You know a fashion designer is leading the zeitgeist when the outfits they wear to take a bow become as influential as those they send down the catwalk. So it is with Gucci’s creative director, Alessandro Michele, who is not just shaking up mainstream fashion with his playful approach to genderless fashions, but is also leading the trend for men wearing more and more jewellery.
Michele himself is known for wearing multiple rings – when he was interviewed by American Vogue last summer, the writer observed he was wearing no fewer than 11 – a styling approach that extended to his men’s spring/summer 2016 runway.
On social media, male models including Lucky Blue Smith and Laurie Harding have been posting images of themselves with several fingers decked out with rings. Meanwhile, backstage after the Valentino men’s show in January, I was busy snapping pictures of models wearing several rings and bracelets on each hand.
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Luke Day, editor of GQ Style, is one of the most photographed people during the men’s shows, and has been shot recently wearing lots of rings. Day explains that he has some jewellery that he wears all the time, which is of deep sentimental value while the rest of his jewellery choices he just switches up. “I have eight Gucci rings that can be worn as anything, from two at a time to all eight, but the plan is to get another eight and wear all 16, two on each finger. Liberace style. I never do anything by halves,” he says.
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At the last round of shows in January there was a notable increase in jewellery on show on the catwalks while on the high-street, Topman reports strong sales across its entire jewellery category. “These things always come around in cycles,” says Day. “Suddenly, jewellery is back in a big way. And it’s everything, all at once. A necklace, multiple rings, a pin or a few, with a neck scarf, a beret or some other adornment.”
At Alexander McQueen’s autumn/winter 2016 show last month, models wore pins on their lapels, single earrings and, in some cases, extreme, punky face jewellery that went from ear to cheek to mouth. Jonathan Anderson’s collection for Loewe next season features a gold giraffe brooch and gold pendants on rope. After his latest catwalk show in Paris, Kim Jones, men’s designer for Louis Vuitton, spoke with enthusiasm backstage about a jewellery collaboration he has worked on with Jade Jagger. Outfits here were finished with silver necklaces that danced with diamonds and LV pendants, brooches adorned suit-jacket lapels and berets were offset with a single LV shield earring.
Ben Cobb, editor of bi-annual style magazine Another Man, whose autumn/winter 2015 issue was somewhat ahead of the curve in featuring the musician Arca sporting some pretty major earrings, believes the current interest in men’s jewellery is a natural development. “Men have been embracing ever more embellishment and detail in their wardrobes, so jewellery is the next level of expression,” he says. “It’s also maybe an extension of the 1970s influence on fashion at the moment, the era when men freely explored jewellery.”
“It’s not just about buying the right jacket any more,” says Day. “You need “the hat/glasses/courage etc to complete the look.” He adds: “I think the interesting thing about jewellery now is it definitely adds more character, and fashion has really taken that idea recently and run with it. Fashion certainly isn’t boring right now.”
“I don’t think men have ever been so open to wearing jewellery, and we’ve seen this with the Topman customer,” says Gordon Richardson, global creative director for the brand. “I wear a skull ring every day and have done for years and would feel lost without it. The only thing I’d say is don’t over-do it. Wearing one strong piece you love has a lot more impact than wearing a bit of everything all at once.”
For the designer Sebastiaan Groenen, whose critically acclaimed label Pieter launched for autumn/winter 2014 and is shown during London Collections Men, jewellery has been integral to the overall vision of the label. His MASC earrings (autumn/winter 2015) and his Cruise necklaces (autumn/winter 2016) are “an easy way to express little sexual jokes,” the designer says. For example the word “cruise” means something quite specific in gay culture, rather like the designer’s “FUN NOW” jumper from his debut collection, which made a deliberate reference to the language of Grindr. This season’s collection also features clothing with fastenings that are based on piercings.
Groenen had his ear pierced specifically to wear his own earrings. “I do feel that men are a lot more open – especially young men – to wearing things than had previously been labeled as feminine,” he says. “I design my collections to express masculinity, but I do think that what is happening now means that guys are much more interested in wearing a single earring, and so on. The boundaries between masculine and feminine are falling away.”
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