On Vigors, and what men's jewellery is actually for
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When I started pulling the men's pieces together into their own collection, the first thing I had to push back on was the idea that men's jewellery has to be heavy.
It doesn't. Some of it is. But the men I see wearing jewellery now, like properly wearing it and not just at weddings are buying pieces that are finer and more subtle, perhaps fine silver chain, a small gold hoop or single skull on a thin silk cord. The work isn't about showing off, moreso about doing what good jewellery does, which is making the person wearing it feel slightly more like themselves.
That's the part the men's jewellery market keeps missing. The cufflink-and-signet-ring world is still trying to sell men's jewellery as a category defined by tradition and weight. Iron and fire. Viking helmets. As if men have to be sold permission to wear something delicate.
This idea that men's adornment must be apologetic or armoured is historically very recent. For most of human history men wore more jewellery than women. Egyptian pharaohs were buried in gold collars. Roman senators wore signet rings as both status and signature. Medieval English kings layered themselves in chains of office, brooches, and rings stacked three to a finger. Renaissance portraits show men in pearls, rubies, gold cord, and earrings as a matter of course. Drake had an earring. Shakespeare had an earring. The earring in the famous portrait of Edward de Vere isn't a costume choice - it was what men of any standing wore.
What happened was the early nineteenth century. The dandy gave way to the businessman. Beau Brummell pushed men's dress into a register of dark wool, white linen, and almost no ornament - a deliberate rejection of aristocratic display in favour of bourgeois sobriety. Industrial-era masculinity hardened around the idea that adornment was either feminine or showy. By the Victorian period, a man's permissible jewellery had shrunk to a pocket watch, a signet ring, and cufflinks. That shrunken palette is the one the high street still inherits today.
It's only really in the last decade that the door has properly reopened. Look at where the major fashion houses have been heading. Alessandro Michele's Gucci, even after his departure, normalised men in pearls, stacked rings, layered chains, brooches pinned to lapels - work that referenced the Renaissance directly. Louis Vuitton under Virgil Abloh built an entire jewellery vocabulary for men around chunky chains, monogram pendants, ear cuffs, and rings worn in multiples. Bottega Veneta has built one of the most influential men's jewellery offers in the industry, with heavy gold chains, simple cuffs, knotted-leather pieces, by treating jewellery as core to the wardrobe rather than a finishing accessory. Saint Laurent does the rock-and-roll version. Loewe under Jonathan Anderson goes to surrealism, with pendants that look like found objects and earrings that read as sculpture.
The men's jewellery customer in 2026 has been educated by all of this. He's looking at the same Instagram feeds the rest of us are, and he wants something with detail, with intention, with a story behind it. Something that holds up next to a good linen shirt or a worn leather jacket. The fact that it happens to be made of solid silver or gold is part of the appeal, but it isn't the headline.
The independent makers serving this customer are still relatively few. There's a generation of London and European jewellers like All Blues, Hatton Labs, Tom Wood, and Maple - all building credibility in the space, but most of the volume is still at the fashion-house end or the high-street-traditional end. Nothing much in the middle. That gap is where the Vigors collection sits.
So Vigors has heavier pieces in it, yes. The cast bracelets. The skull rings. Pieces with real presence. But it also has the smaller things - a thin silver ear hoop, a fine pendant on a cord that disappears under a shirt or a skull bead the size of a fingernail. A neckscarf silver or gold toggle for a piece of silk, which is the most elegant thing I've been working on for menswear and I hope will give men a reason to wear more silk and cashemere scarves
What ties them all together isn't a heavy weight. It's the same thing that ties all of my work together: every piece is made by hand, in my studio on the south coast, and every piece is hallmarked at the London Assay Office. That's the bit that matters. The rest is just deciding what kind of day you're having.
The name Vigors is my son's middle name. It's Viking, but I didn't pick it to make the work feel like a longship reenactment. I picked it because it's a strong word for a collection that belongs to him eventually.
If you want something heavy, it's here. If you want something low-key, that's here too. The collection isn't trying to tell anyone how to be a man. It's just trying to make things worth keeping, are wearable and hopefully get passed down to future you's.