Alton Mason Joins Kendall Jenner As French Jeweler Messika’s First Male Ambassador

Messika has a new man and also wants us to get naked. Where diamonds are concerned, that is.

He walked the runway alongside Naomi Campbell at Messika’s Paris Fashion Week show in September and now Alton Mason has been unveiled as the first male face of the French jewelry house.

The model and dancer stars alongside Messika’s current female ambassador, Kendall Jenner in a new cinematic campaign shot in California’s Palm Springs desert.

Mason joins fellow male luxury jewelry ambassadors like actor Timothée Chalamet at Cartier and French dancer Hugo Marchand at Mellerio.

For the first act in the three-part saga which will roll out over the course of this year, Mason wears the new XL bracelet from Messika’s My Move collection alongside stacked Move Titanium bracelets and rings and military inspired necklace, Move GI.

It’s a continuation of the notion of ‘everyday diamonds’ expressed on the Paris runway where the brand’s high jewelry collection was showcased by models dressed in Nike sportswear.

During an interview in Paris last month, founder Valerie Messika described how time spent in the United States informed both the campaign and her ongoing creative strategy for the brand.

Working increasingly with American retail partners, she’s been drawing inspiration from the “energy and confidence,” she’s seen on the streets she said. The desert concept “pays tribute to the strength and power of the country.”

It also led her to supersize Messika’s emblematic My Move collection creating “bigger and more statement pieces” from aforementioned cuff bracelets to chunky chains and chokers for both sexes — as showcased by Alton Mason and Kendall Jenner.

“Before I used to think separately about men’s and women’s jewelry,” she acknowledged, explaining how the agender-fication of jewelry she’s been witnessing in both the United States and Asian markets has evolved her perspective and prompted her to create new categories.

We’ll see the concept gaining momentum in the second and third acts of Messika’s 2023 campaign which unveil jewelry designed to be shared across the sexes.

Meanwhile, as showcased by Jenner, she’s also reinterpreted the traditional diamond tennis bracelet into new multi strand affairs entitled D-Vibes, with stacked rings, bracelets and necklaces featuring diamond discs sitting flat to the skin.

“I wanted to create an effect of naked diamonds,” she said. “When you see the pieces from above you don’t see the links so it looks like a diamond tattoo.”

The idea stems from a childhood memory. When her diamond dealer father brought home parcels of loose stones, Messika would place them directly on her skin. “I’d be playing with them and imagine I was wearing a ring,” she recalls.

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