The Explosion in Men’s Jewelry Is Breaking All the Old Rules

It takes three security checks to get into a room that holds a billion dollars in jewels. Badge, photo ID, badge again. And then, there you are: a high-security vault, except it is more than eighty thousand square feet, with twenty-eight-foot ceilings. This was the exhibition space inside the Wynn Las Vegas, which every year hosts two of the jewelry trade’s biggest events.

The first thing that hits you is the scale. It’s room after huge room full of dealers and connoisseurs. Everyone in the crowd is dressed basically one of two ways: for dealing (casual, so the jewelry does the talking) or for showing off (the dandies wearing their best pieces). The wide aisles keep everything visible. The lighting is unreal, built to maximize the appeal of precious metals and dazzling stones.

Though adjacent, the two shows are very different animals. Couture is the trade show for jewelry makers and manufacturers of every stripe, where dealers come from around the world to see what’s new and place orders. The Las Vegas Antique Jewelry & Watch Show is where the finest vintage and antique pieces find their way into the cases of the dealers who cater to collectors. At the antique show there’s so much product it’s disorienting: gems in every color and shape and size, ancient coins, natural pearls, every metal you can think of, pieces you could hang on a wrist or a shoulder or pin to an ear or a lapel. Both shows are for the trade only; members of the public are not allowed. But a few years ago, a dealer got me in, and I’ve been going to both ever since. They always run at the same time, and they’re the best places to see the cutting edge of what will show up in the top personal collections in coming years—and, after that, what will become part of the personal style of guys across the country.

There was a time when most of this stuff would have been off-limits for a man. For way too long, the rules of men’s jewelry didn’t allow for much beyond diamonds and gold, silver, or maybe another metal. Anything colorful, anything past subtle, was gauche or outré or—let’s be honest—considered too feminine. Not anymore. The global men’s jewelry market is on an insane run: According to Polaris Research, it was valued at $48.56 billion in 2024 and is projected to hit $124.13 billion by 2034, with North America alone making up about 60 percent of that.

You can see it on red carpets. Kendrick Lamar pinned two Rahaminov diamond brooches on his cap at the Super Bowl LIX halftime show. Connor Storrie showed up to the 2026 Golden Globes wearing one of Tiffany’s Bird on a Rock brooches (more on those shortly), only to be outdone by his Heated Rivalry costar when Hudson Williams wore a Bulgari brooch to the 2026 Oscars. And of course A$AP Rocky, Esquire’s most stylish man in music, turned up at the 2025 Met Gala with a Bulgari high-jewelry peridot brooch on his lapel, as well as in this very magazine this very year dripping in onyx and sapphire and diamond.

The reason this is changing? Men’s fashion is having a glow-up moment. There’s a whole generation of men following a trail from clothing to watches to having the confidence to wear jewelry their fathers never would have touched. But that’s only half of it. The other half: Right as this generation was coming up, the diamond market cratered, and that completely reoriented the fine-jewelry industry. New stones, new styles, new rules. All of it turned a place like the Wynn exhibition hall into a playground for the dealers who cater to men who’ve decided that adornment isn’t gendered, taste isn’t fixed, and a brooch on your left breast can say as much about you as the watch on your wrist.

My father was a preppy—Brooks Brothers sack suits, oxford-cloth button-downs. He loved watches and kept it simple: Calatravas or a Rolex sports watch. A man of his era, in other words. I thought of him while talking to Ann Marie Stanton, a veteran dealer in vintage and estate jewelry I met at the show. “Our fathers and grandfathers were locked into watches, cuff links, and a wedding band,” she says. “That was acceptable male jewelry for them.”

I should mention my father also wore a subtle pinkie ring with his initials.

The shows were packed with people who’ve been tracking the shift away from the old rules. Gerald Bauman, a fine-jewelry dealer in Los Angeles, has been ahead of the curve for decades. Twenty-five years ago he created a line of men’s silver jewelry for Neiman Marcus. “A lot of people doubted that men would buy jewelry,” he says. “It became one of their top-selling jewelry brands.” He thinks weddings helped kick the whole thing off. When same-sex marriage became legal, more men started wearing engagement rings. First it was gay men, then straight engagement rings became part of the trend too. Now it’s necklaces, bracelets, brooches—pieces that used to be aimed exclusively at women. Take the Van Cleef & Arpels Alhambra bracelet, Stanton says. It’s a clover-shaped good-luck charm, four motifs ringed in gold beads, a Van Cleef icon since 1968. It’s also, traditionally, a women’s staple. Now it’s on Drake. On LeBron James. “It’s mainstreaming something that was so boring on a woman,” Stanton says, “and so fascinating and cool on a male.”

Bill Rhodes, whom I also met at the shows, wears his Bird on a Rock like a boss—which is the only way to wear a $200,000-plus brooch on a perfectly tailored suit with no tie. It was a vintage Tiffany piece, a Jean Schlumberger design from 1965, inspired, so the story goes, by a cockatoo the designer ran into while vacationing at his holiday home in Guadeloupe. Bunny Mellon owned one of the first examples. Rhodes is the high-jewelry director for Tiffany in Las Vegas. He had a simple answer when I asked him what counts as men’s jewelry: “Anything that is in a case.” No particular accessory, material, or color should be off-limits. “Candidly, men’s style and jewelry should only be dictated by the wearer’s style and confidence,” Rhodes says. “Individualism has never been more prevalent in the world or in jewelry than right now.”

The argument that confidence is all it takes to pull off a piece of clothing or an accessory isn’t new. So what kept men, for so long, to almost exclusively wearing expected accoutrements for the wrist or ring finger? Culture, mostly. There just wasn’t room for fine jewelry’s flourishes in the stoic masculine ideal. Colored gemstones were seen as garish, risky—the province of eccentric uncles and European aristocrats. But there was one exception: diamonds. Somehow opulent and neutral at the same time, they were safe. They had something the other stones didn’t. They were controlled, stately, risk averse. Diamonds were forever.

Key word: were.

For as long as anyone alive has been thinking about wearing diamonds, one name has owned the stone: De Beers. The 138-year-old British company with roots in South Africa controlled sales of roughly 80 percent of the world’s diamonds as recently as the 1990s. And even more than it controlled the stones, it controlled the mystique. In 1947, a copywriter working for De Beers came up with the line “A Diamond Is Forever.” For decades, the power of that idea never faded.

Then came lab-grown diamonds.

The problems didn’t emerge right away. A team of scientists at General Electric led by H. Tracy Hall cracked the process of creating diamonds in a lab—indistinguishable from those dug up from the earth—back in 1954. At first, lab-grown diamonds were incredibly expensive and posed no competition to natural diamonds. But inevitably production costs dropped. Then they kept falling, for decades. In 2008, a synthetic diamond might have cost roughly $4,000 per carat. In the years that followed, it dropped to between $300 and $500. Wholesale prices for a one-carat synthetic stone have crashed roughly 96 percent since 2018.

The result? The diamond mystique isn’t just fraying. It’s unraveling.

Today the price of lab-grown diamonds is basically the price of the electricity needed to grow them—they’ve become a commodity. When De Beers attempted to set a per-carat floor for lab diamonds, the oversupply fell right through that floor.

De Beers posted a $511 million loss in 2025 after sitting on roughly $2 billion in unsold inventory the year before. Corporate parent Anglo American has spent years trying to engineer a sale of the company. Reportedly, its 85 percent stake was on the block this summer for $1 billion—a fraction of the roughly $18 billion De Beers was worth when it went private in 2001.

“Lab-grown diamonds have fatally injured the diamond industry as we knew it,” says Stanton. “There are so many lab-grown diamonds on the market, and the price just seems to get lower and lower. … I’m glad I’m not a diamond dealer.”

But Bauman sees a silver lining in the wreckage. “It’s opened the door for emerging jewelry designers to create diamond pieces at a lower cost, which is exciting.” And the bigger effect is elsewhere: “Since lab-grown diamonds have become mainstream, I have seen more people considering gemstones like emeralds, rubies, and sapphires,” he says. In this new world, “they seem more rare than diamonds, especially for marquee pieces like engagement rings.”

The data backs him up. U.S. colored-gemstone imports were up 136 percent between 2020 and 2024, while diamond imports—after peaking in 2022—plummeted by more than half by 2024. At the Oscars of the jewelry industry, the trade magazine Instore’s annual Design Awards, organizers added a whole new Small Batch Colored Gemstone category. This was the year after Rapaport, the diamond industry’s pricing bible, launched a colored-gemstone trading network at the American Gem Trade Association’s GemFair in Tucson. That’s the equivalent of the New York Stock Exchange adding a new asset class.

The classic luxury paradox is playing out in real time: When the alternatives become ubiquitous, real scarcity becomes priceless. Can colored gemstones be synthesized? Sure—lab-grown sapphires and rubies have existed for more than a century. But that’s not the point. The point is that with diamonds knocked off the throne, the whole hierarchy of value got reshuffled. Colored gemstones were always there. They just needed the king to fall before anyone paid attention.

Consider the engagement ring, perhaps the most iconic piece of diamond jewelry there is. In a 2026 study, wedding brand The Knot put lab-grown center stones at 61 percent of 2025 engagement-ring purchases. Meanwhile, Michelle Orman, president of Last Word Communications and the veteran publicist behind Couture, estimates that about 15 percent of engagement rings now give gemstones that primary setting.

In a sense, De Beers engineered its own downfall. Its monopoly-like control of the market and its prestige-driven marketing helped create the universal grading system and the commodity-like interchangeability that made diamonds so vulnerable to lab-grown competition. Once there was a rigid system for grading and valuing diamonds, all the lab-grown stones had to do was score just as well as the natural ones, and that was the beginning of the end. The colored-stone world, on the other hand—less centralized, less lucrative—runs on expertise, trust, and relationships built over decades. There is no price list. Instead, you talk to the kind of folks who flock to the Wynn.

The show is so big that booths are numbered and intersections are marked like the perpendicular streets of Chicago—where a lot of the dealers come from. I walked those streets with my friend Wilson Liu. Like me, he isn’t a member of the trade. When I came to the shows last year, he happened to be in town, and I invited him along. He was the kind of guy I could imagine getting into jewelry, having followed the trajectory that a lot of fashion-conscious men have traced in recent years. Liu is forty-two, single with no kids, an internist and hospital administrator in Alhambra, California, and he’s in the middle of a mid-career glow-up. Not long ago, he discovered Bryceland’s, Fortela, and A. Presse—Japanese and Italian brands that treat every stitch like it matters—and his whole sense of style shifted. Then came watches, a small collection of vintage Audemars Piguet and Patek Philippe put together with the same precision he brings to medical diagnostics. Liu bought a piece at the shows last year, and since then he’s become a jewelry connoisseur, acquiring rings from Cartier and Hermès.

Liu is methodical. We walked from one end of the massive ballrooms to the other, making sure not to miss a row—and then we walked them again, in what Liu later told me in an email was “an opportunity to sharpen the eye for sculptural form, scale, and color intensity.”

The booths at the antique show feel almost identical, mostly wall-less rectangles with giant safes provided by the organizer. (Still, you’ll sometimes see millions of dollars of diamonds protected only by the pressure-sealing lid of a Rubbermaid tub.) The bare-bones setup lets the pieces do the talking: signed Schlumberger, estate Bulgari, Victorian mourning jewelry, loose Colombian emeralds the color of new growth.

The booths at Couture matched that explosion of color. On display: pink sapphires, bicolor tourmalines, rubellite, spinel, garnets, morganite, aquamarine. Hard stones like lapis, carnelian, malachite, and mother-of-pearl were replacing enamel. Even peridot was having a moment. Inlay technique—stones custom-cut to fit pieces—was on the rise. Orman pointed out bold new looks with no precious metals at all—cords, beads, openwork.

As with any show, there’s always a dealer who’s on trend—or, more importantly, making trends. Bauman and Stanton shared a booth, and they always had a small crowd of domestic and international buyers around them. They were two of the first to spotlight Bulgari Monete pieces—jewelry set with vintage coins. The collection started as a way for the Bulgari family to make its collection of ancient Roman currency a defining part of the house’s artistry and legacy.

Stanton names Bulgari as one of the houses getting the most attention, and the Monete pieces are a big reason why. “There’s a real allure and cachet in wearing something thousands of years old,” she says. The collection was conceived by Nicola Bulgari himself in 1966, back in the La Dolce Vita era, when Rome was the center of glamour and paparazzi camped outside the brand’s flagship on Via dei Condotti hoping to catch Elizabeth Taylor or Grace Kelly leaving with something extraordinary. Taylor became the collection’s most famous devotee—Bulgari later bought back several of her pieces at auction. Grace Kelly was photographed in a chunky Bulgari chain set with a coin. Goldie Hawn, Candice Bergen, and Andy Warhol, who famously called the Bulgari showroom “the most important museum of contemporary art,” all wore or collected the coin jewelry.

But here’s what’s telling: For sixty years, the Monete collection lived almost entirely in the world of women and connoisseurs. There’s no iconic photo of a man wearing a Bulgari coin necklace the way there’s Taylor dripping in them on the set of Cleopatra. Today, vintage Monete pieces are listed on 1stDibs as “Unisex, suitable for all age groups.” They’re a big part of the genderless trend.

In fact, Liu’s taproot piece, the one he bought last year, was a vintage Bulgari Monete ring. The history that obsesses a guy like Liu—his eye for provenance is what drew him to Pateks in the first place—was always there. The audience is finally catching up.

The popularity of the Monete pieces shows there’s something deeper going on than just shifting cultural norms about a particular stone or color. The collectors I know—the ones who spend years tracking down a specific reference of a specific watch from a specific year—are starting to realize they can bring that same obsessive patience to jewelry. Bauman put together a strand of natural pearls for a client—not cultured but iridescent spheres that occur naturally, no human intervention—one pearl at a time. He matched them by size, luster, and overtone. A strand like that can take thirty years or more to put together.

That’s where this is headed. Not to a mall jewelry counter. Not to a branded collection refreshed every season. To the thirty-year project: the ancient coin set in gold by a specific house. The opal tracked down from a mine that’s tapped out. The one-of-one piece with a provenance that reads like a novel. Not everyone will be buying five- or six-figure accessories, but the point is that the same impulse that drives a man to spend years restoring a vintage car—the patience, the specificity, the refusal to settle—can today be applied to what he wears on his lapel.

I saw it with Liu. He’s hooked. I was exhausted after two days in the exhibition halls—even a single day among so much beauty is sensory overload. But when I went looking for Liu to grab dinner the second evening, I discovered he’d slipped back down to the floor. He kept doing that over three days. Ultimately, when leaving the show floor one day, he took a quick turn into the new Cartier boutique in the Wynn lobby. He picked out a simple Juste un Clou brooch in rose gold and slipped it into the lapel of his Armani rice-stitch suit, a pop of sophistication on the dark fabric. A relatively reserved choice for him, but I saw it as something remarkable. His fit couldn’t have existed five years ago. Not because Cartier brooches didn’t exist—they’ve existed for over a century—but because the idea of a forty-two-year-old doctor from Alhambra walking out of a Las Vegas jewelry show with a brooch on his lapel? That was brand-new.