Mens Jewelry, stuff you make for the guys!

Hey Folks! On another jewelry forum that I'm on someone started a thread for folks to share and discuss jewelry designed for men or jewelry that has a more masculine look. I thought it would be an interesting thread to start and share with here as well. I'd love to see pieces that folks have made just for a man or that they feel men would be comfortable wearing. Also, is there anyone out there who makes jewelry JUST for men or has a significant percentage of their buyers who are men? Love to hear your feedback as well.

I must confess that amongst, shall I say, "MY people", we are not so prone to assigning a gender to our jewelry. I certainly understand the dominant gender paradigms in jewelry and fashion design but I have always been a strong advocate of subverting the dominant paradigm! That being said, most men, myself included, DO hue to more traditional norms when it comes to ornament. For example, I DO own a very nice, high quality, rhinestone tiara, but I seldom wear it out in public. I mostly wear focal beads that I make myself and I think my work is very elemental and gender neutral.

It's interesting how social norms have changed around men and jewelry, just in my lifetime. In the 60's & 70's it was ok and popular for younger men to wear chains and beads, but any ear piercing was still seen as pretty gay, and most men older than 30 seemed to be more conservative, sticking to strickly "manly" rings (wedding band, class ring, military, signet rings) and tie bars or tie tacs. Men of my father's age and certain geographic locales might wear a bolo tie.

To me, it seemed by the 1980's men's jewelry had practically gone underground, except for the men's "Single Earring". During the 80's and the Mtv generation a lot of guys started to wear a single earring in their LEFT ear. During this time period the fashion phrase for a man who wanted to get his ear pierced was "LEFT IS RIGHT AND RIGHT IS WRONG." According to this credo, a man with his left ear pierced was a heterosexual (or closeted) and a man with only his right ear pierced was a homosexual. A guy could get multiple piercings in his left ear, but if he went to the right side people got even more suspicious. I got my left ear pierced in the 80's and suffered a lot of homophobic slurs even though I had pierced the "Straight guy" ear. In the late 80's I came out of the closet and got my other ear pierced and started wearing matched pairs of surgical steel big hoop earrings. For me it was a political act as much as a fashion statement.

By the 90's it was ok for straight guys to get both ears pierced and then EVERYBODY started piercing EVERYTHING! The piercing craze certainly has done a LOT to increase the number of all kinds of men wearing jewelry, or at least men wearing piercing jewelry. I think it's interesting that so much of what is accepted as fashionable amongst "men's jewelry" is the sort of "Modern Primitive" look that accompanies piercing jewelry. I mean, here in Portland, Oregon where I live there are LOTS of mostly straight men who have LOTS of piercing jewelry, plugs, and stretched ear lobes. However when I'm in Tucson at the big trade shows for the jewelry industry, it becomes clear that jewelry for men is an extremely teeny tiny portion of the jewelry trade.

All in all I would just like to see more men being more comfortable wearing more jewelry to accessorize themselves. Heck, since we're so firnly in the age of cell phones many men have even stopped wearing a wrist watch, which for most of the 20th century was the epitome of men's jewelry fashion. Anyhow, enough of my babbling on. I'll share a couple of pics of my beads that I think ANY man would feel comfortable wearing as a traditionally masculine look.

When men wear necklaces they're much more likely to wear a single pendant on a chain than they are to wear something with multiply strung beads and that pendant is more apt to be a straightforward design or linear shape as opposed to something too curvy and patterned. Also, most men can't wear as short of a chain as a woman can wear (chokers interfere with adams apples) and I don't think a really LONG necklace works out to be very masculine either. Personally I think 18 to 24" is the ideal length for a man's necklace with the length depending on the shirt he's wearing!

I make a lot of my beads in a classical "shield" shape which I think lends itself to masculine imagery. This shield shaped bead is made out of a high grade copper ore from the Keweenaw Peninsula in Michigan's UP. It's dark with dark green epidote inclusions and splotches of shiny pure copper....

while this rare Tanzanian Iolite Sunstone bead does have sparkles in it, the watery blue color, the internal fractures, and the linear, curved rectangular shape give it a masculine edge and it would look nice alone on a chain.

Another shape that I do that I think reads well as a more "masculine" shaped pendant shape is what I call a "Wedge Shape". This wedge shaped bead is made out of rare 250 million year old petrified tree fern from Brazil...

That's it for now! I look forward to seeing more jewelry stuff for the GUYS!