My friend recently recounted to me her planned Tompkins Square Park meet-up with an ex, a couple months post-(amicable)-breakup. Among the several bits of gossip and personal developments they’d caught up on, she was most caught off-guard by the glint of her ex’s new accessory: a tight silver hoop. Apparently, he’d longed for one for some time, but hesitated because a saucy piece of metal on his ear would go against the sartorial status quo of his stuffy finance job. But then he plucked the hoop off to show my friend that it wasn’t a real piercing, but a clip-on. His work didn’t suddenly become amenable to body modification—he just wanted the look, so he sought a less permanent avenue. But that desire for a little hoop extends well beyond downtown-y finance guys with clip-ons.
Though the accessory is certainly not new—shoutout to Michael Jordan—hooped men have recently gone mainstream in Hollywood. (For what it’s worth, I’d estimate there are about a dozen hoops affixed to the lobes of our most stylish GQ staffers right now.) And, from what I have gathered, the thirst for a guy donning such a piece of ear candy is just as widespread. Even if it’s ultimately just an earring (a pierced ear is a rite of passage many women endure before they can even speak), a man in a tasteful little hoop exerts a visceral, immediate pull. When I recently polled some peers about the phenomenon, nearly everyone I spoke to had some theory about what it signaled. Some warned that the accessory underscored a man’s rakishness (“art h0” was the exact phrase someone used) while others argued it communicated coquettish confidence. Mostly, though, the consensus I gleaned was that the hoop carried a faint but unmistakable “bisexual energy,” which only heightened the intrigue.
Read on about the phenomenon here.
