I did it in the late Seventies, but everyone did. Here Tom Ford puts it well: “I think ‘You poor thing’ if I see someone doing that. It’s one reason Gianni Agnelli took to wearing his watch over the top of his cuff. The same goes for the conical style of cuff, where it tapers noticeably towards the hand. The disadvantage of this is that you can’t fit a watch underneath. Basically, it stays where it’s meant to be. And it’s less likely to get pulled back when the arm is extended. There is a functional advantage to having it fitted close to the wrist: the sleeve can have some excess length, without the cuff ever slipping further down the hand. The smaller overlap created by having the button closer to the edge helps too. This is sometimes called an open cuff.īeing lower allows the cuff to open more easily and the wrist to move with more freedom. Personally, I quite like the Italian style which places the single button low on the cuff, and close to its edge (below). If there is, and I haven’t thought of it, forgive me. There may be a functional reason for some people to have multiple buttons.
With multiple cuff buttons you are needlessly adding redundancy. You don’t need more than one button, so why have them? Yes, we don’t need buttons on jacket sleeves either, but they’re a redundancy that’s slowly fading. You can also have one, two or even three buttons on the cuff. There’s nothing wrong with the others if you like how they look. The style choices, as with a double cuff, include whether the protruding corners are rounded, angled or square. With the single cuff, there are also some small style choices – though I’d suggest the fit choices are more important. If it was, then sprayed-on suits from Tom Ford would be similarly legitimised. Certainly, the fact that James Bond once wore it is not justification enough on its own. I think the best you could say about it is that it’s nifty. This is a folded-back cuff that leaves a triangular gap, allowing it to be fastened by buttons instead of a cufflink. I’d say the same thing about the cocktail cuff, confusingly referred to as both the Milanese and Neapolitan cuff by some sites. Get into the subtleties of fit or cloth instead. If you like them and want to wear them, fine.īut if you start showing them off, or describe them as your ‘style signature’, then you’re focusing on the wrong things. There are a few different types of double cuff, principally depending on whether the corners are rounded, angled, or square (see above).Īs with much in this area, there’s no real harm in the first two options, but also not much to say on their behalf. It’s a nice change, and a nice excuse to wear cufflinks – which are, after a watch and a wedding ring, probably still the only universal way for a man to wear jewellery.
I’d still encourage readers to have a double-cuffed shirt or two in the wardrobe though.
It’s understandable that they are becoming much more prevalent, even if dress codes weren’t also tending towards casual. The thing is, single cuffs also look fine with most suits, so they are much more versatile – from worsted to woollen to weekend. If the smart material or spread collar didn’t tell you this was a mismatched shirt, the cuffs and cufflinks certainly did. That Mad Men era also saw a lot of men wearing the same double-cuffed shirts to the office on a Friday, with chinos. That’s great with a suit, or even a smart jacket, but it looks out of place with a woollen blazer or knitwear. As with black tie trousers, hiding a seam makes things smoother, and is therefore seen as more formal. Today, double cuffs are rarer, both because the fashion has faded and because they are more formal than a single cuff.Ī double cuff is formal because it folds over, hiding the seam at its end. But then, it was also the era of Mad Men and tie clips, so perhaps that was at the root. It was rare to even see a single cuff in the City for many years. The double, or French cuff was very fashionable 12 years ago, when this website started. There is one really fundamental choice when you’re picking the cuff for a shirt: single or double.
#CINCH SHIRT SERIES#
This is the second in our series looking at style aspects of shirts.Īs with the previous one – on shirt collars – it will focus on sensible advice, rather than illustrating the myriad gimmicks with which menswear seems to be particularly plagued.
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