Alan Crocetti’s innovative, unexpected designs don’t just chart a new territory for fine jewelry, but for a more fluid, post-gender future that celebrates individuality.
By JON ROTH
How do you pack a manifesto into an earring or a charm? How do you communicate a world view with a bracelet? It’s no easy task, and while designer Alan Crocetti may not claim that all his pieces have a credo, it’s clear there’s a well-founded philosophy behind his fine jewelry line. It’s one thing to come up with the season’s must-have signet ring or statement necklace. Jewelry trends easily: because it’s worn daily, because it’s front-and-center on the head, neck and hands. But in the past five years, Crocetti’s work has bucked trends in favor of a well-defined doctrine: self-presentation is self-preservation.
In fact, it’s built into the brand’s tagline: “Love your vessel, find your armor.”
Crocetti’s given that line quite a bit of thought, and he expounds on it easily. “There’s nothing more empowering to me than a sense of self-awareness and self-love. In my experience, finding our armor helps us to stay in touch with those feelings,” Crocetti says. “That’s how I see jewelry. My pieces ground those feelings in the material, in something we can see and touch. They become true extensions of our bodies.”
There is an element of self-love in the act of adornment, especially if you are adorning yourself with Crocetti’s jewelry: precious gold and silver pieces that range from darkly sexual, to alien, to delicate, to reptilian. But then, unabashed adornment isn’t something many men have felt comfortable with for most of recent history. A watch and a wedding band is one thing. But a silver rose earring with a stem that grazes the wearer’s jawline? A set of silver hoops spiked like spurs? Designs like these - artful, outré, unapologetically decorative - have popped in and out of men’s fashion in decades past, but remain resolutely women’s territory.
Crocetti has no interest in which jewelry ‘belongs’ to which gender. He designs for human bodies, and leaves the definitions to others. “I want people to understand that gender, sex, sexuality and beauty are not static and can be constructed and reshaped,” he says. “It’s time we stop putting humans into boxes constraining the kind of relationships they can or cannot have with each other. I want people to feel free.”