Wearing Worlds: Contemporary Jewellery as a Cultural Interface in a Global - Digital Era

In this article, the term cultural interface is used to describe jewellery as a meeting point between different systems: material resources, technical skills, social institutions, bodies, and digital infrastructures. Rather than treating a piece of jewellery as a self-contained artefact, the concept foregrounds the relations that make it legible, valuable, or controversial in specific contexts. This view builds on anthropological and cultural theories that have described objects as nodes within wider “social lives” and “cultural biographies”, as well as on recent work on platforms as infrastructures that organise visibility, circulation, and power. By adopting the language of interface, the article emphasises not only how jewellery reflects culture, but how it actively shapes encounters between humans and non-humans—stones and metals, archives and algorithms, institutions and avatars—across both physical and digital spaces.

To clarify the article’s structure, the argument is developed through a four-dimensional model of interface: (1) material–semiotic interface (value, signs, and embodied wear); (2) socio-institutional interface (identity, mediation, and the fashion/art system); (3) geo-cultural interface (circulation, place-making, and heritage translation); and (4) techno-posthuman interface (platforms, data, and extended bodies). Each section foregrounds one dimension while keeping the others in view, so that jewellery is read consistently as a relational interface rather than a self-contained object.



From Ornament to Critical Language

Contemporary jewellery is increasingly defined by its conceptual ambition rather than by the intrinsic value of materials (den Besten, 2011; Skinner, 2013). Rather than affirming fixed norms of beauty or social status, many works intervene in cultural assumptions about value, adornment, and even the limits of the body itself.

For example, Susan Cohn’s Last the Blast (2006) and Kyoko Hashimoto’s Coal Musubi (2019) do not simply provoke through form or material, but encode narratives of violence, extractivism, care, and memory into intimate, wearable forms. These objects enact what Barthes (1990/1967) describes as social codes, and what Appadurai (1986) terms social things: material artefacts that travel with meanings across time, systems, and bodies.


Susan Cohn. Necklace: Last the Blast (detail), 2006. Jewellery as a critical, wearable argument.
Kyoko Hashimoto. Neckpiece: Coal Musubi, 2019. Material memory and intimate scale.


Beyond isolated cases, the critical language of contemporary jewellery emerges through recurring gestures: the use of humble or recycled materials to challenge value hierarchies; exaggerated scale to question norms of wearability; and the refiguration of mundane items into charged signifiers of class, gender, and labour. These practices resonate with both semiotic approaches to adornment (Adamson, 2007) and theories of material agency that frame form and substance as active participants in social experience (Gell, 1998). In this view, jewellery does not merely carry meaning—it co-produces it through the body’s movement, weight, and touch.



Jewellery as Cultural Mediator

Jewellery has long articulated status, ritual, and belief, but contemporary practice often foregrounds its role as a mediator of identity and cultural discourse.
Ted Noten’s Mercedes brooches recast fragments of a luxury car into postmodern meditations on mobility, fetishism, and economic aspiration, while Pamela Zamore’s scarab signet rings weave ancient symbolism into contemporary narratives of rebirth. Designers also use jewellery to negotiate memory and gender politics: family stories, queer visibility, and non-binary embodiments are staged through chains, rings, and earpieces that move fluidly between the private and the public sphere. Jewellery here becomes a cultural mediator linking intimate biographies, collective struggles, and the fashion system, situating individual bodies within broader narratives of class, gender, and global consumption.



Global Circulations and Hybrid Places

Globalisation has transformed contemporary jewellery into a dynamic interface where local techniques, ancestral motifs, and community-based practices intersect with global flows of capital, taste, and digital visibility. The circulation of jewellery today involves not just the movement of objects but also the migration of aesthetics, values, and authorship.

One frequently discussed example is the town of Idar-Oberstein in Germany—historically grounded in local agate cutting and water-powered craftsmanship—now positioned within transnational gemstone networks, importing raw stones from abroad while preserving its artisanal skill base. Such examples challenge a fixed notion of “place,” suggesting instead a composite of situated knowledge, material infrastructures, and institutional memory (Cresswell, 2015; Massey, 2005).


Gem cutting as infrastructure: how “Idar-Oberstein as place” is made through skill, tools, and transnational material flows.


Cross-cultural collaborations illuminate similar tensions between locality and circulation. Kiff Slemmons’s paper jewellery project with Taller Arte Papel Oaxaca does more than introduce alternative materials—it activates a relational ethics between global artistic discourse and community-rooted economies, inscribing social and ecological narratives into wearable forms. Meanwhile, objects such as Tuareg silver amulets or Miao ceremonial headdresses—once embedded within ritual or kinship structures—become heritage artefacts when displayed in global museums, their meanings refracted through curatorial mediation and institutional translation (Unger & van Leeuwen, 2017). The act of display itself becomes an interface: not only between cultures, but between the living significance of objects and their museological afterlife.

Across regions, many brands actively remix traditional symbols—such as the Hamsa Hand, the Evil Eye, jade carvings, or Thai chada—within contemporary silhouettes and production logics. Rather than viewing such hybrid designs as mere commodification, it is more productive to see them as occupying what Bhabha (1994) terms a “third space”: a space where cultural authority is not simply inherited but contested and remade. These objects speak to a cosmopolitan aesthetic sensibility that navigates between revival, resistance, and global fashion systems (Hall, 1997).

In the Thai context, contemporary jewellery also operates as a site for reimagining heritage through aesthetic experimentation and scholarly engagement. Sarran Youkongdee’s collection ‘Last Love in the Moonlight’ transposes the visual language of courtly garlands and cinematic nostalgia into elaborate compositions, transforming mourning, longing, and ritual memory into wearable narratives. Meanwhile, ‘O in Suvarnnabhumi’, developed by Supavee Sirinkraporn, reimagines the wealth of ancient Southeast Asia through archaeological forms, maximalist styling, and sensory intensities. Drawing on prehistoric beads, Dvaravati-era ornaments, and indigenous craft vocabularies, the project explores jewellery as a communicative medium in which time, gesture, and place coalesce, while a wormhole motif—drawn from theoretical cosmology—evokes the universe. Further, Khajornsak Nakpan’s ‘Layer (Me)Soil’ employs microbial textile fibres extracted from late-Holocene archaeological soils in Pang Mapha, Mae Hong Son, pushing this interface even further by melding environmental science, fashion design, and historical consciousness. By engineering sustainable, bio-based fibres from prehistoric sediment and integrating them into fashion systems, her practice reframes both “soil” and “body” as carriers of ancestral and ecological value.
Khajornsak Nakpan: Layer (Me)Soil, 2022. Merges microbial textile fibres from Pang Mapha soils with body adornment, fashion, and environmental science.



Digital Platforms as New Places and Institutions

Digital technologies have expanded the “places” where jewellery is experienced and legitimised (Plantin et al., 2018). Augmented Reality (AR) try-ons can allow users to test rings and earrings on their faces or hands via smartphone cameras, turning the interface into a micro-exhibition and the screenshot into a new kind of visual evidence. Metrics such as views, likes, and shares can begin to function similarly to curatorial judgements by allocating visibility and desirability (Plantin et al., 2018).


TRILLION Metaverse presents jewellery through interactive viewing and AR try-on, relocating curation from gallery space to screen-based protocols.


NFT jewellery can introduce a data twin to the object: a token may authenticate a physical piece or exist as a purely digital jewel applied to avatars in online environments. Luxury houses that issue limited NFT passes for bespoke designs, or develop metaverse-only collections, can shift value from material scarcity alone to controlled access, blockchain-verified ownership, and platform-specific rarity. In this sense, digital platforms function as new institutions that confer legitimacy alongside galleries and museums (Plantin et al., 2018).

Metaverse environments can free jewellery from physical constraints of weight and comfort, enabling impossible scales, movements, and modes of attachment. Here, jewellery exists simultaneously as file, token, and visual effect, distributed across servers, screens, and social networks, while still participating in established languages of prestige and distinction. This platform-based ecology also redistributes curatorial power: recommendation algorithms, influencer campaigns, and community norms all shape which pieces become visible, collectable, or canonical within digital cultures of adornment.



Posthuman Aesthetics and Extended Bodies

The convergence of wearable technologies, smart jewellery, augmented reality (AR) filters, and virtual influencers signals a significant shift in how jewellery operates—no longer merely as ornament, but as infrastructure. In this context, jewellery becomes entangled in systems of datafication, sensory modulation, and algorithmic governance. Smart rings and bracelets that track heart rate, oxygen saturation, or activity levels do not simply adorn the body—they interface with cloud systems, apps, and platforms that extract, visualise, and monetise biometric data. Here, jewellery functions as a sensor, a dashboard, and a behavioural protocol—an extension of what Zuboff (2019) describes as “surveillance capitalism.”

Artists and experimental practitioners foreground this shift. Moon Ribas’s seismic sensor implant, designed to allow her to feel real-time earthquakes through vibration, collapses the boundaries between prosthesis, interface, and performance. Similarly, virtual influencers such as Lil Miquela and Thailand-based avatars like Katie function as fashion models and brand ambassadors—despite having no corporeal body. These digital entities wear jewellery created exclusively in virtual spaces, participate in luxury campaigns, and accrue social capital through clicks, shares, and algorithmic reach. The jewels they wear are both artefacts and filters—simulacra that signify without material form.

These examples suggest that contemporary jewellery plays an increasingly active role in scripting not only identity but also ontology itself. As Hayles (1999) notes in her formulation of the posthuman, the boundaries between human subjectivity and intelligent systems are porous and co-constitutive. Braidotti (2013) likewise frames the posthuman condition as a space of affirmative ethics and expanded subjectivity—one in which humans, technologies, and environments form assemblages of affective and epistemic exchange.

From this perspective, the jewel is no longer confined to the surface of the body. It becomes an actor in a network—an interface through which desires are quantified, moods are read, and identities are visualised. Theoretical frameworks from Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and Latour (2005) support this understanding: jewellery participates in what might be called a technocultural assemblage, linking avatars, sensors, platforms, and users. Affect, value, and identity flow not only across materials but also across code, networks, and machine vision.

In short, posthuman jewellery does not merely express the self—it constructs it across human and non-human nodes. These adornments demand that we rethink agency, embodiment, and presence within digital–material ecologies. As such, jewellery today is not only worn; it perceives, responds, and performs within distributed systems of meaning.



Conclusion

Across artisanal workshops, heritage communities, luxury branding ecosystems, and emerging digital infrastructures, contemporary jewellery no longer functions as a self-contained artefact but as a dense, relational interface. Its meanings are not inherent but emerge through interactions between materiality, craft practices, narrative frameworks, institutional logics, and technological mediations (Appadurai, 1986; Kopytoff, 1986; den Besten, 2011; Unger & van Leeuwen, 2017). This networked view repositions jewellery as an active participant in cultural, economic, and epistemological systems.

Framing jewellery as a cultural interface enables a more expansive understanding of its role in mediating across conceptual binaries: local and global, historical and contemporary, analogue and digital, human and posthuman (Braidotti, 2013; Hayles, 1999; Plantin et al., 2018). In this expanded field, jewellery becomes not only a site of personal expression or cultural identity but a medium of critique, experimentation, and speculative worldmaking (Adamson, 2007; Gell, 1998). It is a locus where questions of value, memory, authorship, and embodiment are materially negotiated—and continually reconfigured.

For makers, curators, researchers, and wearers alike, this perspective calls for an attunement to the ecologies in which jewellery circulates. It requires engagement with globalised supply chains and local craft knowledge, with platform dynamics and algorithmic curation, with bodily rituals and avatar-based fashion. It also demands ethical responsiveness to issues of sustainability, cultural translation, and technological disruption.

Ultimately, to approach jewellery as a cultural interface is to view it not simply as something worn—but as something that wears the world. It is a medium through which futures are imagined, subjectivities are extended, and relations—human and more-than-human—are materially and symbolically forged. In the global–digital era, jewellery remains small in scale yet vast in significance: a microcosmic site where aesthetics meet politics, where history meets speculation, and where bodies—fleshed or coded—negotiate their place in the shifting topologies of culture.




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About the author

Supavee Sirinkraporn is an artist-researcher and lecturer at the Faculty of Decorative Arts, Silpakorn University, Bangkok. Her work spans contemporary jewellery, material culture, and design humanities, with a focus on adornment as a cultural interface across bodies, institutions, and digital platforms. Through practice-based inquiry, she reinterprets Southeast Asian archaeological and vernacular references through speculative form, maximalist styling, and sensory materiality. Her author jewellery project O in Suvarnnabhumi (2023) reconstructs regional wealth narratives by translating prehistoric beads and Dvaravati-era ornament vocabularies into contemporary wearable worlds. She teaches studio and theory courses, supervises graduate research, and contributes to interdisciplinary initiatives linking craft, heritage studies, and emerging technologies. Her writing addresses questions of value, authorship, and posthuman aesthetics, and her creative work has been exhibited and presented in academic and professional contexts. She is committed to research that connects local knowledge with global debates in contemporary jewellery and design scholarship in Thailand and beyond.

Author’s profile: https://sure.su.ac.th/xmlui/browse?type=author&value=Supavee+Sirinkraporn
Email: supavee.s@gmail.com