Never Too Late To Wear Watch Cuff Links

This weekend I did some work for MTV, so I was hanging out with the hip and happenin' set. One interesting delineation of age was to see who was and who wasn't wearing a wristwatch. Unless they were blinged out, few of those folks encumbered their wrists with timekeeping devices. Instead they'd dip into their pocket to fish out their mobile phone, tap a few digits to turn off the keyguard, then finally see what time it is.Seems to take a bit longer that way than if they just had a darned watch. However I did find interesting that this was a sort of return to the same set of gestures you might use if you carried an old fob pocket watch.

I'm probably not classy enough to wear a pocket watch, nor do I have an especially snazzy wristwatch. So what about those times when you want to dress a little more formally and still know what time happy hour starts? I've got something here to kill two birds with one shirt cuff.

 

Men's fashion changes at a glacial pace. The sort of news that makes waves is whether french cuffs are coming back or not every forty years. Cuff links come and go a little more often. I tend to like them as they let you personalize what might be just a very ordinary shirt. Usually they're just decorative (at best perhaps serving as a reminder of your own initials since they're so frequently monogrammed) but occasionally someone gets clever offering some practical advantage. One of this pair of cuff links is quite ordinary, while the other is outfitted with a working watch. These were made by Swank (the menswear manufacturer, not the "gentleman's magazine" publisher...), and are admittedly quite swanky. My guess is that they took a mechanism for a smaller woman's watch to find something that would fit a nickel-sized cuff link.

Scoff if you will, but let's face it... you're never going to catch the eye of the ladies flashing them the clock in your cell phone.

Help out Retro Thing when you buy some watch cuff links on Ebay