Wit & Attitude Quote by Tom Jones

Tom Jones is doing something sly here: he’s defending an old-school aesthetic while refusing to apologize for it. The line starts as personal history but quickly turns into a mini culture war, with “jewellery” standing in for showmanship itself. Jones has always been a performer whose image was part of the instrument - the open collar, the swagger, the gleam. When he says jewellery “went out of fashion,” he’s not really talking about accessories; he’s talking about a period when sincerity got policed through minimalism.

The bite is in the phrasing: “Like grungy and punk bands didn’t wear jewellery because it was stupid.” That “like” is conversational, but it’s also distancing - a shrug toward a scene he doesn’t quite claim. Punk and grunge sold themselves as anti-glam, anti-artifice, allergic to anything that looked like “trying.” Jones reduces that posture to a simple insult, flipping the script: maybe the real stupidity is pretending that performance is beneath you while still depending on image, branding, and attitude.

Context matters. Jones came up in an era when pop masculinity could be flamboyant, even a little camp, without needing a manifesto. By the time grunge arrived, excess signaled sellout. His remark is a veteran’s side-eye at trend cycles that mistake austerity for authenticity. He’s also quietly insisting that style isn’t a moral category - it’s a vocabulary. Jewellery, for him, is punctuation: an extra beat, a flash of confidence, a refusal to disappear into the “correct” uniform of cool.