Hip hop jewelry has been mostly inspired by the hip hop community as a whole and recently has become totally embraced by Hollywood stars and been brought into the mainstream market to where even your grandmother would know what you meant by “bling bling”.
One of the most surprising elements to the phenomenon is that it’s considered a fresh thing or even a 90′s style that has carried over but it’s not. We all can remember benefit in the 80′s flava flav flashing a tall clock around his neck and replacing his natural smile with gold. The hip hop and rap culture had been promoting this for decades prior and now it suddenly is mainstream.
A theory on urban fashion jewelry would be that Hollywood has been embracing the urban culture more and more over the years and upon rap becoming more and more mainstream to the extent of when you turn on MTV you no longer have a daily hour segment to rap videos after the hours of rock n’ roll or alternative music, but rather a total reversal where you’d be hard pressed to obtain any rock videos or anything besides hip hop or rap.
So the rap culture would seem to not have changed at all but rather society has embraced it more. Parents skittish at the lyrics sang by fifty-cent and Eminem apparently had never heard the music of NWA in the 80′s and some of the rappers then whom were absolutely preaching the same if not more indulging of the urban culture.
Hip hop jewelry and bling bling as it were is utterly the sincere same expression of this culture that exemplifies the success of the hip hop culture and which artist has made the most and who has approach up in what is seen as an oppressed inner city lifestyle where it is harder to “design it” than a wealthy “well to do” culture.
So the bling bling is definitely here to finish as long as our society has rap and hip hop ant the forefront of our media and culture. Hip hop jewelry is section of the culture and is absolutely nothing novel, the only thing current is that hip hop is mainstream and that rap artist are not impartial icons to inner city youth but now to every suburb around the globe in the western world.