The designers modernising men’s jewellery

PRESLEY OLDHAM
Creator of dainty pieces with mystical undertones

American designer Presley Oldham, 28, was destined to have an artistic career. His father Brad is a sculptor. Fashion designer Todd Oldham is his uncle. And his grandmother Linda was a fine artist and a jewellery designer. “There was no other option for me, it’s just how my brain was wired,” he says. “I’ve always been interested in how things are made and how they are crafted.”

Oldham’s grandmother taught him how to make jewellery when he was around eight years old, a skill he rediscovered at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. He says the project “felt very achievable and a good vehicle for my creativity”. Oldham, who had previously worked as a film actor and writer, was aching to do something that could end up in a finished, concrete product. “Jewellery felt like a beautiful alternative where I was able to get my hands in something and finish it properly,” he explains.

Oldham launched his eponymous label in May 2020, photographing his first pieces on himself, the only model available in the first few months of the pandemic. In the shoots, a bare-chested Oldham wears strings of freshwater pearls connected to each other with twisted silver wire, a technique that has now become his signature and one he has used for earrings, bracelets and body chains.

His jewellery is dainty, the pearls’ irregular shapes and iridescent colours — pink, lavendar, sage, mint — giving it a mystical undertone. One of his bestsellers is the Primrose necklace ($320), a delicate pink freshwater pearl chain with a slightly larger pink pendant in the middle. The collection was quickly picked up by the media. “All of the press that I got said, ‘Presley Oldham is making pearl necklaces for boys’,” he recalls. “There is no ill will around that, but it’s started to box me in. When I made that first collection I really didn’t think about gender in any way; I just wanted to make beautiful objects that anyone could pick up and wear.”

Oldham has continued to model his own jewellery in other campaigns, which also include female models, and his pieces have been worn by a rainbow of celebrities, including singers Joe Jonas, Troye Sivan and Kendrick Lamar and actors Jenny Slate, Ben Platt and Amy Sedaris. He continues not to think about gender: he says his jewellery has been popular with a wide range of customers, from people in their twenties and thirties in the queer community in New York to Texan men in their sixties.

“I think we are moving away from gendered jewellery — which is delightful,” he says. “We are putting limitations that aren’t necessary when we say, ‘this is a boy necklace’. The customers are telling us it doesn’t matter. For me, it comes down to, we all have bodies worthy of decoration.”

We all have bodies worthy of decoration

Until now, Oldham has made all of his pieces himself by hand from his studio in upstate New York, but growing orders have led him to look for freelance artisans to help ease production times and workload. Last year, sales doubled to 16,000 units, bringing in a “high five-figure” revenue, thanks to a growing roster of wholesalers and retail partners, for which he creates exclusive collections that don’t undercut sales he makes through his own website.

Oldham works with deadstock materials, such as Murano glass beads from repurposed necklaces, and sources most of his pearls from small businesses, often owned by Native Americans, across the south-western US. “You can’t always control where the pearls are actually produced, but I try to be very intentional about where I put my money and who I’m sourcing them from,” he says.

He is working towards broadening the range of materials he works with, exploring the use of precious stones and gold to add fine jewellery pieces to his production. This will enable him to sell some of his creations at a higher price point, between $2,000 and $10,000, and expand his pool of clients, while also continuing to offer his now well-known entry-level pieces. Currently the highest-priced item on his website, the Compost belt with sterling silver or gold-fill chain, costs from $1,050, but most of his jewellery is priced at between $100 and $700.

While scaling his business, he is committed to maintaining his hands-on, local approach. “I’m not going to send my pieces out for production in another country that I don’t have any connection to,” he says. “I’m an American designer. I want to engage with communities here.”

TOBY VERNON
Self-taught designer experimenting with ancient techniques

In 2020, Toby Vernon, 24, decamped from London to his hometown of Lewes, East Sussex, to spend lockdown with his family. There Vernon, who at the time was studying menswear design at the University of Westminster, picked up an interest in lost-wax casting, one of the oldest forms of jewellery-making, after ordering a custom-made ring for himself.

“[The designer] was explaining how he made it and he mentioned lost wax. I started googling it and thought it looked super fun,” says Vernon, speaking on Zoom from his Brighton studio. Vernon got so hooked on designing jewellery that his degree’s final collection in 2021 was designed to complement a series of handmade sterling silver buttons, buckles, brooches and pins. “I was fighting with my tutors because I was making so much jewellery, and I needed to back that up with clothes so I could use it in my degree,” he recalls. The creative transition from fashion to jewellery was an easy one for Vernon. “For me, designing fashion was always about showing the process, being quite raw and organic, showing the pattern-cutting and stitches, leaving seams and hems raw. It seemed that this could be translated into jewellery creation with lost waxing.”

The technique, which was first used around 6,500 years ago, involves moulding wax, often by hand, around objects or playing with melted wax on different surfaces. It’s a way of working that encourages experimentation and the creation of one-of-a-kind pieces with organic, free-flowing shapes. Vernon’s jewellery, which he started selling under his brand The Ouze in 2021, espouses this “rough around the edges” aesthetic: his rings, pendants and brooches are made of textured pieces of silver and gold, encasing irregular, uncut and colourful gemstones such as sapphires, emeralds and rubies. The brand itself is named after the river Ouse, which snakes through Lewes on its way to the sea, as a nod to the free-flowing spirit of the jewellery.

“Traditional men’s jewellery is super-refined, polished and uniform — for me, it was boring,” says Vernon, who looks at second-hand markets and antique shops for inspiration. “I was always drawn to vintage and antique pieces where you can see the worn, texture and story,” he says. Colour was another missing piece in the men’s jewellery category that Vernon wanted to provide. Using small, rugged and raw gemstones, as opposed to finely cut ones, was a way for him to add a masculine touch to precious stones and vivid hues more often associated with women’s jewellery.

I’m drawn to vintage pieces with a story

Vernon’s business is growing, but remains small. Since launching, the designer has added six online and physical stockists, mostly in the UK, the biggest one being Mr Porter. The first order from the online retailer came before Vernon had even graduated. It was a stamp of approval, but also a challenging experience for the designer, who was still working solo out of his flat. “Those first wholesale orders, I was definitely just breaking even because I wasn’t pricing things correctly,” he recalls. Since then orders have increased in quantity, sometimes requiring him to deliver up to 300 pieces, so Vernon has started hiring freelance designers. “I was so keen to be true to myself, with every single piece handmade by me as a labour of love, but it was impossible,” he says.

In the past two years Vernon has continued to teach himself jewellery design, learning setting, soldering and engraving. Using alternative techniques to lost-wax casting has allowed him to branch out and use additional materials, such as emeralds and pearls, which were previously off-limits because they would not withstand the heat required by lost waxing. Using these materials, he has been able to add necklaces, bracelets and earrings to his offering, which initially consisted mostly of rings. The designer has also launched a bespoke service, which is proving popular for wedding ring orders.

Vernon’s focus is on organising the internal infrastructure of the brand and building a solid team to meet the demands of retailers while growing his direct-to-consumer business through his website, expanding his reach beyond the UK. “I’m in a position where I can start contacting the stores that I really want to work with and start spreading out internationally,” he says.

His final goal, however, is to develop The Ouze into a fully fledged brand encompassing different categories. “I’m quite keen to start making furniture, using the same technique and language of jewellery, and applying it to different areas,” he says. “Hopefully, there will be a time where I will have more time to experiment with different scales, making this brand bigger than jewellery.”

JACK CANNON AND JOE GELB
Designers of new takes on classics

As a child, Jack Cannon, 39, would spend much of his time running around Hatton Garden, London’s historic jewellery district, while his dad, a watch trader, worked down the road. “I have been in and out of Hatton Garden since I can remember,” he says. It was natural for him to return to the district when, all grown up, he wanted jewellery for himself but couldn’t find anything suitable in shops.

“[I was looking for] something that would be a little bit more interesting and a bit more of a statement, but not covered in diamonds and gold, and way out of my budget,” he explains. He decided to start making pieces himself, leveraging his contacts in the storied district. “I would pick the chain that I wanted, pick the clasp that I liked, pick the jump loops and then take it to one of my assembly friends, someone in Hatton Garden that does soldering and polishing. I started wearing these pieces and giving them to my peers and it all just started to build up.”

In 2018, Cannon and his childhood friend Joe Gelb, 32, turned this passion project into a men’s jewellery line aptly called Hatton Labs (it has now been rebranded as just Hatton). Neither of them has formal training in jewellery. Cannon handled social media for Nike in the Netherlands before moving back to the UK in 2017 to work as a culture consultant with clothing stores USC and Flannels. Gelb spent six years in Los Angeles managing pop stars and rappers before returning to London in 2018 to work with menswear brand Casablanca as brand manager.

Initially built as a part-time, direct-to-consumer business, Hatton became a full-time operation in 2020, with a growing number of wholesale accounts. Last year, wholesale sales, which account for 95 per cent of the business, reached £2mn.

The pearl moment catalysed men to be more open in style and jewellery

Cannon and Gelb’s clients are predominantly men; the duo say they “design with men at the forefront of our minds”. The jewellery, however, is representative of how much men’s tastes have been liberated in the past five years. Alongside classics such as cuban bracelets and link chains in silver and gold, Hatton creates silver rings with heart-shaped lilac zirconias, silver earrings in the shape of poodles, chunky chain bracelets with linking rose motifs and a whole array of pearl jewellery, often in shades of pink, including double strings of pearl necklaces, pear drop earrings and pearl necklaces decorated with daisy motifs.

“Men are now comfortable buying what they like, more so than what they think they should wear,” says Gelb. He credits the “pearl for men” trend that started at the end of 2019, when celebrities such as Harry Styles, A$AP Rocky and Shawn Mendes started wearing pearl jewellery on red carpets, as the “penny drop moment”.

“[It] definitely catalysed men to be more open in style and jewellery,” Gelb continues. “It opened the door for men to wear colour in jewellery, wearing precious and semi-precious stones, as well as pink pearls and flower-motif jewellery. There is definitely more confidence in what people are buying compared to what we used to sell three or four years ago.”

The brand’s jewellery is still designed in Hatton Garden, but the volume and timings of wholesale orders — their first order from London-based boutique Browns in 2019 asked them to deliver 300 products within a month — have pushed Cannon and Gelb to find new manufacturers abroad. “London really can’t support that kind of demand,” says Gelb. For Cannon, the decline of Hatton Garden, which has been struggling with rising rents, international competition and the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic, has also played a part in their decision to relocate production.

“Hatton Garden used to be full of manufacturers, but right now it really has slimmed down to the point where there are probably only two people in the area doing casting; not many people doing stone setting,” he says. “Nowadays it is mostly watches, chains and some pawn shops.” The brand now makes jewellery in Italy, where it has built a network of around 10 companies.

The plan is to broaden the product offering to include accessories, such as bag hardware, small handbags and belt buckles, which Hatton debuted in June. “We are interested in absolutely anything that can be decorated with metal and stones,” says Gelb. “We don’t want to be restricted just to fingers, wrists and necks.” 

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