Arabella Byrne

The signet ring is back

Gen Z is fuelling a rise in demand

  • From Spectator Life
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The signet ring is back. Perhaps, like King Charles, who has worn his since the 1970s, you think it never went away, but I can confirm that it did – sometime around the time of the New Labour government, when being seen as a raging toff was bad for business. Now, thanks in part to the Instagram account Signet Ring Social and posh television and film dramas such as Saltburn, the signet ring, or ‘siggie’ as it is referred to by Gen Z devotees, is making a comeback. Perhaps, instead of the hemline index, used as an indicator of bull or bear economic markets, we may consult the signet ring index as a guide to prosperity. Do you see more or fewer ‘siggies’ in a recession, and what exactly does that tell us?

Small but mighty, the signet ring punches above its weight, managing to say so much with so little. Class, bloodlines, patrilineal heritage – it’s all there, twinkling away on the pinkie finger of the left hand. Unlike the male wedding ring, which announces something boring and rather smug – I’m taken, hands off – the signet ring is mysterious, offering up all sorts of social statements: I am descended from aristocrats, I own a vast estate, or simply, I am a gentleman. But gentlemen beware. When it goes wrong – too chunky, too bling, too gold – the signet ring undoes all its symbolic power and simply announces to the world that you live in Clapham and work for Foxtons.

Precisely because it is worn by princes, penniless Sloanes and the middle classes alike, the signet ring has long been a peculiarly confusing British statement. Once a piece of jewellery that possessed a literal function – monarchs historically used signet rings to seal documents in wax – the signet ring was reserved for royalty and aristocrats alone. From the Renaissance onwards, when class and trade merged, the signet ring trickled down through society to become not just political but also aspirational. In our own moment, one need only look at Pippa Middleton’s shiny siggie to see how far the signet ring has travelled from its original iteration and intended sex.

Perhaps because of the erosion of its original status, the signet ring continues to provoke a ludicrously outsized reaction in most people. One male friend tells me that he used to take his off before job interviews in case the ‘enemy’ discriminated against him. A female friend tells me, having presumably done some research into the matter, that ‘men who wear signet rings are amazing in bed’. In popular culture, singer and former Guards officer James Blunt (né Blount) attributes the class fury he received in the British press partly to the signet ring that he has always unapologetically worn. When David Nicholls’s One Day was dramatised on television, much was made of the signet ring worn by his middle-class male protagonist, Dexter Mayhew – even if true signet ring aficionados will have noted that Dexter’s ring was all wrong: silver, far too effeminate, and without even a crest. The other problem, of course, is that he’s called Dexter.

‘We make about 40 a month; five years ago, it was just ten a year’

To better understand the numbers, I speak to the experts. Mark Ruff of Ruff’s, signet ring makers of long standing, proffers the theory that signet rings have never gone away. ‘It’s fairly easy to find your coat of arms and crest on Fairbairn’s these days,’ he says cheerfully, ‘but lots of people think they have a special coat of arms when they don’t,’ he notes, explaining rather darkly that one crest may do for an array of surnames. Which brings us to the portable nature of such a precious item: ‘We’re always replacing them because young people lose them in nightclubs,’ he says drily. Guy Burton, director of Hancocks, signet ring makers to the King, has seen a definite spike in recent years. ‘We make about 40 a month; five years ago, it was just ten a year.’ But are his female clients coming to him to have their rings adjusted in the Ozempic era, I wonder? I wager he would be silent on the matter since alterations are presumably good for business.

For the uncensored answers on the take-up of signet rings by Gen Z, I speak to Charles Rolls (28), founder of Signet Ring Social. The idea emerged over a few drinks in the Sloaney Pony in Fulham. Charles believes the signet ring encapsulates class and belonging in his generation. The Instagram page has of 84,000 followers (of which 60 per cent are British he estimates) and posts mainly satirical, self-parodying collages. ‘It started out as memes,’ he admits. When I catch Rolls, he is driving to a shoot in Cornwall and says he is happy to ‘speak for hours’ on the subject. Why are Gen Z wearing siggies, I ask, quietly fingering mine as I speak to him. ‘I hope this doesn’t sound pretentious,’ he cautions, ‘but there’s a deeper meaning to them.’ And just like that, Rolls is off to his shoot and I have my answer: signet rings are back because nothing else makes sense anymore. Sounds reasonable – just don’t lose it.

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