Jewelry

His, Hers and Theirs: Jewelry Crosses the Gender Barrier - New York Times

The London jeweler Sabine Roemer recently toned down a feminine rose gold ring by adding black diamonds for a male client and customized a round tanzanite ring for a woman “so the design is softer than sharp male lines,” she said.

Genderless Jewelry on the Runway

CreditGio Staiano/Nowfashion

The gender blurring has prompted some designers to think again. Luz Camino, who works in Madrid, said she has been re-evaluating her design process because men are wearing her plique-à-jour enamel brooches of flowers or shooting stars. “As I am drawing something,” she said, “if it isn’t feminine I will now think maybe this will be nice for a man too, so I will follow the idea through instead of stopping it as I have done previously.”

For Mr. Baumer, technology has been key. “Three-D printing allows open volumes you can’t do in any other way,” he said, “and creates the most interesting volume shapes as it allows me to see the inside of the ring even before we make it.” He was referring to his Mikado rings which combine, he said, masculine angles with feminine open spaces.

Yet the trend presents challenges. “Merchandising is a nightmare,” the London jeweler Stephen Webster said of his first unisex collection, Thames by Stephen Webster, which he introduced in September in collaboration with Blondey McCoy, a 20-year-old skateboarder and model.

The 15-piece collection, aimed at 20somethings, included razor blade motifs and a cutout that could be a star but also could be a cross.

“We have to carry more sizes particularly for rings and more stock as you can’t make a genderless collection geared to one gender,” Mr. Webster said. “I also had to focus more on what I put out there, reducing the number of pieces in the collection and doing a lot more upfront thinking about design as well as financial implications.” (Normally, the designer said, he does 25-piece collections, of which about 10 pieces become core designs.)

It also took some changes in retailing, Mr. Webster said. In addition to being sold online and at his own boutiques, the Thames collection is available at Palace, the skate streetwear store in London and New York, as “streetwear is genderless and what is disrupting fashion at the moment so customers know they are going in somewhere that is not gender specific.”

As in fashion, genderless jewelry is not new. Seashell beads were worn by both cave men and cave women, Renaissance portraits show aristocrats of both genders wearing jewelry to communicate their status and power and, in India, the maharajahs’ jewelry usually outshone that of the maharanis.

The current and future spending power of millennials is also behind the change in designers’ thinking.

Along with reports showing that young buyers are affecting luxury sales, the Accelerating Acceptance report issued in March by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation shows that more young Americans are rejecting traditional gender labels, with 20 percent of the 18- to 34-year-olds questioned in the 2016 study identifying themselves as socially fluid, queer, bisexual or pansexual and 12 percent identifying as transgender or gender nonconforming.

The jewelry universe’s high-end brands also are taking notice.

At Bulgari, Lucia Silvestri, the company’s creative director, said the geometric B.Zero1 ring has sold across gender lines.

In the spring, Chopard plans to add larger and heavier pieces in titanium and more brushed finishes to its Ice Cube collection from the 1990s to offer a wider choice to an under-40 buyer “who might not have the money yet for high jewelry — but a lot do and will do in the future,” said Caroline Scheufele, the company’s artistic director and co-president.

And Giampiero Bodino, the Milan-based jeweler, is designing his first genderless collection for presentation next fall.

But Wallace Chan, the Hong Kong master jeweler whose recent pieces have reflected his childhood fascination with butterflies, said technological advances like 3-D printing and artificial intelligence soon will put the control in the wearers’ hands: “ “it won’t be the jewelry designer who designs what you wear in seven or eight years’ time but the person themselves.”

And, in vintage

The appeal of vintage jewelry has always reached across gender lines, but never more so than today.

“Men have always bought cuff links, stick pins and signet rings,” said Amy Burton, director of the antique jewelry dealer Hancocks in London. “But in the last five years men have come in looking for bracelets, brooches, necklaces, as there is only one of these pieces so they won’t walk into a room where there are 10 others wearing the same thing.”

For example, she said, a thirtysomething man who works in the City of London wore a vintage 1950s Cartier gold and diamond floral spray brooch at his wedding in June. “He had seen Pharrell Williams wear an abstract brooch at this year’s Oscars and thought it looked cool,” she said. (It was the Chanel Pluie de Camélia brooch, which Mr. Williams wore on his black Chanel tuxedo, along with multiple strands of black pearls.)

Recently, Hancocks listed a 1930s diamond stick pin of a top hat and cane — which several women, Ms. Burton said, have expressed interest in buying.

“I don’t believe there are rules when it comes to people’s individual sense of style,” she said. “People should express themselves however they wish to and this includes through their wearing of jewelry.”

S .J. Phillips, another antiques dealer in London, recently transformed a set of Art Deco ruby and diamond cuff links into earrings for a woman from Texas, lasering off the back fittings and adding butterflies to the design.

“They were easier for her to wear, more discreet and unusual,” said Rodney Howard, a Phillips sales associate. “As more people are seen wearing things like this, more doors will open.”