Arcadia

Cufflinks are seen by two people: the person wearing them, and the person sitting close enough to shake their hand. We designed them for the second range. The milgrain border around the onyx was cut by hand using a knurling tool, not stamped — a stamped milgrain is uniform and dead, while a hand-cut one has small inconsistencies in the bead spacing that read, at six inches, as care.

The onyx was sourced as a matched pair, then polished to a deep black that catches a single point of warm light when the wrist turns. We considered a flat finish. We rejected it. A flat onyx reads as costume. A polished one reads as a stone. The toggle mechanism was tested on five hundred openings before we approved the supplier — cufflinks fail at the hinge, always, and we would rather over-engineer the part nobody sees than over-style the part everyone does.