Cufflinks for Men & Women

In the 1990s, finding – let alone finding a selection of – women’s cufflinks was very difficult. The owner of a tailoring business told me about a female customer who was so desperate to find something to wear with her double cuffed shirts that she bought silk knots in every colour he had.

Today, it’s much easier to find cufflinks designed with women in mind. They are still rare objects in the high street jewellers, which is where some of us start by looking. But most of the mainstream shirtmakers carry a range of cufflinks, and most of them have a few cufflinks aimed specifically at the female market. Even more are available through internet sites specialising in cufflinks.

Even so, few of them have made the jump all the way from men’s to women’s cufflinks. Women, like the customer who bought silk knots in every available colour, often buy with an eye to colour coordination, for example. But most women also like to coordinate their jewellery as a whole. That doesn’t of course mean having ‘suites’ of jewellery as women used to do half a century ago. What it does mean is ensuring that items of jewellery aren’t discordant – to take an extreme example, amethyst earrings set in gold teamed with a large tortoiseshell pendant on a silver chain. And having the chance to coordinate cufflinks with earrings or other items of jewellery would probably appeal to many women.

So this is still a developing market, and one in which the retailers’ best guess about what women want tends to guide the choice on offer – a choice which still doesn’t fully reflect what women would choose for themselves.