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news

Figures of Speech

By Sarah Nicole Prickett

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We know a girl, who knew this guy. This guy wore jewellery. Piles of it. There were probably lots of thing not to like about said guy, but the jewellery was what really got to her. The gold necklaces, the skull necklaces, and, oh god, all the matching bracelets. Her friends joked that he wouldn’t need to talk dirty on the phone. He just needed to say, “I’m taking… my bracelets off,” and that was it. That would do it for her.
And that little joke is an all-too-truism about guys and jewellery. Most men either refuse to put it on (and of course, these are usually the ones who could actually pull it off, in an incongruous sort of way), and the ones who do put it on, put it on all wrong. They wear gino bling with shirts unbuttoned to the fourth or puka shells with Hollister tees. In a word: ugh. Jewellery on a man (or sure, for that matter, a woman) should be simple and personal, more signature than statement.
Which is why, when we were sent the website for seemingly the umpteenth local handmade jewellery line, and saw its moniker—Speech—scrawled nervily across the screen, our yawn turned to a little gasp of delight. And we were even more pleased and surprised to discover the kind of cool, original pieces we wouldn’t make a guy take off before bed.


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When it comes to jewellery for dudes, Speech (named, adorably, in reference to founder-creator Michael Mercanti’s lifelong stutter) is talking our language. There are assorted anchors, perfect for drunken pirates, and heavy metal crucifixes for glam-rock revivalists. Lighter necklaces—like our favourite, a jet-black feather dangling from a silver sinew—have a tribal, talisman-like quality. Every piece is cool enough to wear with plaid flannels and Levi’s, which is the highest compliment our grungy hearts can give. Better still, for the girls, it’s all rather borrowable. (We don’t believe in buying anything for a guy that we wouldn’t want to steal back when he screws us over.)
To order, visit Ssspeech.com. Prefer to try before you buy? Don’t miss the designer’s Fashion Week launch at 10 p.m. Thursday, October 23, at Strangelove (587 College Street). Bonus: the first 150 guests will be treated to a little free Speech—in the form of a silver pendant.
Photos courtesy of Michael Mercanti.

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Comments

  • Adam McDowell

    Jewellery. Two Ls. We adore you Torontoist, but you can be frustratingly lazy about checking your spelling.

  • Gauldar

    Was an American spell checker used perhaps? ‘Jewellery’ is the correct British spelling, but ‘Jewelery’ seems to go through unchecked.

  • Gloria

    Why do people insist that some spellings, perfectly acceptable in other countries, are “wrong”? Come on, guys. I thought we were a mosaic.

  • David Topping

    The lack of double l’s is actually totally my fault, not Sarah’s—she originally had them as double l’s and I replaced them with singles. Blame my dual citizenship. And we don’t run posts through spell-checks; we have real live humans copy editing them.

  • chenyip

    American spelling sometimes rules. It’s really annoying seeing all those red-lines every time you type colour, grey, and neighbourhood.

  • Gauldar

    Ahh, PEBCAK error. I know those well.

  • jaja007

    Or, chenyp, you could just add Canadian dictionaries to your software.

  • ambrose

    Screw spelling errors, this was interesting and I shall give my guy friend a heads up on this, he could use the advice :)

  • montauk

    I would love to do a psychology study on Internet users and obsession with spelling errors. Namely, are they equally obsessed with spelling errors offline? If the writer of non-Web material were easy to access, would they tell the writer about the spelling error, as they do online? Does being finicky about spelling correlate with any interesting personality variables? What traits to users expect in writers with good or bad spelling? Are certain types of errors more punishable than others? How do writers feel about corrections? Does that correlate with anything neat? Ooh, how to right-wing authoritarian writers feel about being corrected? Good, because the rule was enforced, or bad, because it means they broke it? Or does it depend on who does the correction?
    I’m not actually taking any stand here…I’ve been on both sides (correcting spelling, not correcting it) and I’m just curious how this would pan out.
    I love some of the feather stuff but I have a hard time imagining a guy wearing it, unless he was wearing a deep V-neck shirt, and I don’t actually know any guys who wear them.

  • Gauldar

    Interesting questions, I do wonder how many of those come into play. You did forget to add John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Dickwad Theory into the equation though. The stuff I say online I would probably never say in person.

  • rek

    I have seen multiple news pieces about people — always men well into their 70s at the time — who had made a life’s mission out of correcting spelling, punctuation, and grammar errors in various newspapers and magazines (in English and Korean), and informing the publishers each and every time.