The first thing to know about Ryan Reynolds is that he’s married to living style icon Blake Lively. But the second most important should be this: Ryan Reynolds loves to accessorize. Newsboy hats, watches, statement eyewear—the obsession has taken various forms over the years. But it can all be traced back to the early aughts, the golden age of men’s jewelry.
The Moment: A pioneer of the comedian-to-action hero pipeline, Reynolds spent the 2000s transforming his image from goofball to leading man. Having finally made the jump from TV to movies as the star of National Lampoon’s Van Wilder in 2002, Reynolds met singer-songwriter and fellow Canadian Alanis Morissette at Drew Barrymore’s birthday party the same year. The pair started dating, and by 2004 they were engaged. Reynolds subsequently started bulking up for his first superhero gig playing vampire hunter Hannibal King in Blade: Trinity. The film flopped, but it set Reynolds up for the box office success he’d start to have near the end of the decade with the release of Definitely, Maybe (2008), X Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), and The Proposal (2009).
In 2010, Reynolds finally earned the coveted title of People’s Sexiest Man Alive, cementing his status as a Hollywood hunk. But his meteoric rise to stardom had some emotional fallout. Reynolds and Morissette broke off their engagement in 2007, and the following year Morissette released an album about the split called Flavors of Entanglement. “Public romance? I’m going to be avoiding that in the future,” she declared during a promotional interview with
The Look: The height of Reynolds’s jewelry era tracks closely with his three-year engagement to Morissette, and that’s (probably) not a coincidence. Consciously or subconsciously, couples often dress alike. Mirroring each other’s style can be an unspoken way of communicating the strength of your bond to the world. And in some cases, celebrities have used fashion as a sly means of stoking, confirming, and dispelling dating rumors. In this instance, it’s clear that Reynolds was borrowing inspiration from Morissette’s wardrobe, trading frat guy ’fits for a bohemian rocker look. Case in point: the abstract, slightly bejeweled silver pendant he wore to the 2003 MTV Movie Awards.
Following its red-carpet debut, that pendant never resurfaced. But it was quickly replaced with two more necklaces: a silver chain from which dangled a figurine sitting in a yogic pose and a strand of oversized beads so long that it disappeared into his chest hair. One or both of these necklaces likely held some kind of personal or spiritual significance for Reynolds because he wore them almost constantly while promoting Blade: Trinity. He eventually ditched the silver chain but continued to rock the beaded necklace on and off the red carpet well into 2006.
Second only to Reynolds’s love for that weird beaded necklace was his love of cuff bracelets. The studded leather version pictured below is so extremely of its time—very Dane Cook, if you ask me. But the black cloth arm band pictured below got even more mileage during this time, popping up on Reynolds’s wrist for both of his visits to MTV’s Total Request Live in 2005, as well as his red-carpet look for the Teen Choice Awards. The text printed on it reads: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” the first line of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I can’t say for sure, but presumably this came from the UN gift shop? It’s entirely possible that Reynolds is a longtime donor. Earlier this year Reynolds and Lively made a sizable contribution to the UN Refugee Agency in support of the Ukrainian relief effort.
The Legacy: In 2007, Reynolds started to trade his flashier necklaces and cuffs for barely noticeable silver chains before moving on from his jewelry phase entirely in 2008. It’s very plausible that Reynolds chose to give most of these items back to Morissette when they broke up. But if not, there’s a chance one of those cuffs could still be lying around somewhere. Describing himself as someone who tends to “find something and stick with it,” Reynolds gave a peek inside his tightly curated wardrobe in 2019. Of the tattered driving cap he’s worn for 15 years, Reynolds said: “It’s a hat that my wife would kill me if I ever got rid of it. She thinks of it as just indelibly me.”
Recently, GQ a titan of daytime dressing. Crisp jackets, tailored pants, well-worn vintage finds, neutral colors, baseball caps, sneakers, replicable but never boring—that’s his uniform these days. But it makes perfect sense for someone who loves formulaic dressing to develop a penchant for flashier accessories. Men’s jewelry has since made a comeback, with stars like Pete Davidson and Harry Styles sporting Y2K-inspired beaded necklaces from the likes of Beepy Bella and Éliou. Pharrell and A$AP Rocky, on the other hand, prefer pearls. But no one is doing it the way Reynolds was in the early 2000s. Some things never change.
Reynolds’s new show, Welcome to Wrexham, is now airing on FX.
