Cufflinks are amusing things to wear. When you buy a pair of earrings you only need ears to use them and when you buy a necklace you only need a neck to wear it but when you buy a pair of cufflinks you need a special shirt to wear them with and when you buy a shirt with cuffs you have to buy a pair of cufflinks or you cannot wear that shirt.

Before buttons men and women tied the ends of their sleeves with cord so that the wind and cold couldnt get in. More elegant dress clothes were tied with ribbons.

But is the cuffink dead? Hell no! There is a cufflink museum in New Hampshire USA, and a National Cufflink Society. There are people who are obsessed with collecting cufflinks. Take Derek Anastasia who has a collection of almost 17,000 pairs of cufflinks. Anastasia believes that cufflinks made a resurgence in America when Regan came to power and wore cufflinks a good deal. Gene Klompus president of the National Cufflink Society has more than 35,000 pairs!

The first cufflinks were chains, really called cuff fasteners, and as they became more elegant they evolved into items of jewellery and bits were added to the chains.

During the period of the Industrial Revolution in England there was an explosion in the presence of cufflinks as manufacturing methods went from hand made one-off pieces to mass production.

When I see someone wearing cufflinks I always take notice of them. Those cufflinks are making a statement about that person and that person is making a statement about themselves. They are telling me that they are proud of themselves and that they are making an effort to dress to impress.

You can dive out of bed, drape a shirt around you and toss your coat on and rush off to the office and hardly even know what you have done, but the moment you start to put those cufflinks through your sleeves something magical happens.

It is a kind of ritualistic thing where now you are adorning yourself in order that other people will notice you. Now you start to think is this shirt the right one? Is it ironed well enough? Should I wear another coat? You cannot simply snap cufflinks on or push them through your cuffs hastily without thinking. The act makes you slow down and forces you to think about why you are wearing cufflinks. No, the cufflink is far from dead!