Okay, perhaps “never see” is a bit strong…but there was a time, not too long ago where men wore nice, glittery accessories too. Jewellery has never been just for the womenfolk, you know. Men have been wearing jewellery for years, decades, centuries…but somewhere along the line, the classic set of men’s jewellery fell by the wayside, to be replaced by stainless steel, grills on the teeth, tattoos, fake, gold-plated chains, fake, gold-plated rings and earrings which would look more at home on the end of a bull than dangling from a man’s earlobe.

Proper masculine jewellery has seen a shocking decline in recent years. Now we have gold-plated watches, gold-plated necklaces and chains, gold-plated rings and more piercings than an embroidered quilt. And if piercings around the eyes, ears and mouth aren’t bad enough, men’s ‘jewellery’ has recently taken a more southerly route, along the lines of Prince Albert piercings and other delightful decorative detritus (if you don’t know what a Prince Albert piercing is, don’t ask).

This article is about the classic pieces of mens’ jewellery that people used to wear, back when the world was stylish, people had more self-respect for their appearance and looking good meant more than merely working out at the gym. We enter a world of cufflinks, tie-bars, collar-bars, shirt-studs and watch-chains, a world of rings and necklaces and clips which looked like gold and silver because that was what they were made of. We enter the unopened case of mens’ jewellery…

Starting at the Top…

Unlike womens’ jewellery, mens’ jewellery usually served a double-purpose of being both decorative, but also practical and useful at the same time. And the amount of jewellery that men could wear was considerable, even without all these modern and sight-searing invaders. So what did men wear back in the day?

As I said, men’s jewellery was practical as well as pretty and a lot of it was used in conjunction with clothing. The standard, white dress-shirt took up a lot of the jewellery on a man’s dressing-table, which is quite an achievement in itself. The following articles of jewellery were typically tacked, tied, tangled or thrust into a shirt to either hold it together or give it extra sparkle.

Cufflinks

Cufflinks…classic mens’ jewellery. The kind of things that wives give their DHs in those classic movies from the 40s and 50s in those touching, family-friendly Christmas & birthday scenes. Cufflinks have been around for over a hundred years, since the mid 1800s right up until today. Their purpose, as the name suggests, is to link the cuffs together. The cuffs being the shirt-cuffs on the ends of your sleeves.

“Yeah but all shirts have buttons on the cuffs. What do you want me to do? Cut them off!?”

Not all shirts have buttons, silly! Formal dress-shirts, button-down long-sleeved shirts and business-shirts made by various clothing-manufacturers used to (and still do) make shirts with what are called “French Cuffs”.

French cuffs are twice as long as ordinary cuffs, and don’t contain any buttons, but instead contain four (or sometimes, six) buttonholes on each cuff. The cuffs are folded back on each other so that the buttonholes line up, and then the cuff is pinched together so that it makes a raindrop shape. The cufflinks are then pushed through the buttonholes to hold the cuff together.

A shirtsleeve with French cuffs. Note how the cuff is folded back before the cufflink is passed through the buttonholes to hold it together

Most pairs of cufflinks came in a distinctive T-bar design, with the link being pushed through the buttonhole to have a small metal tab flip out the bottom (forming a shape something like a seriffed letter “I”). Cufflinks could be plain steel ones, or they could be (and usually were) ornate and decorative pieces of jewellery with pearls, diamonds, lapis lazuli, bloodstone and other precious, semi-precious or just plain preposterous decorative stones or other materials included in them to give them extra bling.

Shirt-Studs

The classic dress-shirt does seem to be lacking in the department of buttony goodness, doesn’t it? If a shirt didn’t have cuff-buttons, then it would surely have something to hold the bloody FRONT together!…Right?

No, actually.

So, enter shirt-studs.

Shirt-studs were a bit like cufflinks, only they came in sets of more than just two, often four or more; and their job was to hold together the front of a shirt (like what…oh I dunno…BUTTONS? do?) in a stylish and decorative manner. Unlike cufflinks, though, which could be shiny and decorative and all that stuff, shirt-studs usually had to be a certain colour to go with the shirt which they were being worn with. They were made up of two small discs of metal, held together by a very short length of chain. One disc passed through both buttonholes in the shirt (one at the front, one behind) to hold it shut, and in the end, you’d have a row of shirt-studs going through the sets of buttonholes on your shirtfront, giving you a nice, uniform appearance.

Collar-Studs

Having done up your cuffs and your shirtfront, it was time to put on your collar.

Wait…what?

Yes. Your collar. In the old days, shirts did not come with collars. They were detachable (as were some cuffs, by the way). The reason for this was because that most men wore shirts for days or even weeks at a time before taking them off, but would change cuffs and collars frequently. If the shirt you have doesn’t need a collar tacked onto it, ignore this. Otherwise…

…Shirts with detatchable collars lasted well into the Twentieth Century; these are the classic, stiff, starched collars that you hear grandmother or grandfather complaining about having to wash (and wear) when they were children. They were held onto the top of the shirt with a set of collar-studs (or pre-sewn buttons, if you had them). Putting on a collar like this could be quite an ordeal, as Roald Dahl found it, when he mentioned struggling into his school uniform in his autobiography “Boy: Tales of Childhood”. But…people will go through anything for fashion (which is true of any period, not just of the early 20th Century!).

With your cufflinks, shirt-studs and collar-studs on, you now had to do up your tie. But you don’t like how your collar flops around and doesn’t stay where it’s meant to…and it’s wiggling your tie all over the place. Relax. That’s why the collar-bar was invented!

The Collar-Bar

I admit that I was rather ignorant of this piece of jewellery until fairly recently (if you can call it jewellery, more like an accessory). The collar-bar is a bar or rod of metal used to hold the two ends of the collar under your chin, in-place, and to stop them from going where they’re not meant to. Collar-bars could also be used to keep a tie in-check and stop it flopping around. There were three kinds of collar-bars…

– Pins and Needles

These were rather basic collar-bars; they poked through the fabric of the collar (a bit like a safety-pin) to hold the collar together and down. Not the best kind if you didn’t want your collars full of unnecessary holes!

– Pinch it

The second variety of collar-bar had miniature clamps at each end; these clamps…uh…clamped onto the wings of your collar and kept it down and close together. Tidier and without risk of being pricked by a sharp pin.

– Push and Pull

The last collar-bar was used with collars which had pre-manufactured holes in the collar-wings. The final variety of collar-bar was pushed through these holes and held the collar in-place.

Tie-Bars

Often associated with businessmen or detectives wearing two-piece suits, the tie-bar is a simple clip or slide which holds a necktie together to stop the two ends flapping around and getting out-of-line. Tie-bars were sometimes sold along with cufflinks as a three-piece set of two links and a tie-bar all in one.

Rings

Some people wear rings for individuality. Some wear rings to show membership to a certain group of people. A school, a club, a company, a university or a certain organisation. But in the “old days”, not many men wore rings. But the rings that they did wear were real marks of individuality, which would stand out even more today than they did a hundred years ago.

These days, wearing a wedding-ring is something done by both sexes. However, it may surprise you to know that it wasn’t until pretty recently that men as well as women, started wearing weddings to show their marital status.

Signet-rings were traditionally the man’s ring of choice. They had the man’s coat of arms (either his own personal arms, or those of his family) or his monogram (initials) engraved on the ring in mirror-fashion, so as the ring could be used to seal documents with sealing-wax. While this function of the ring (which is what it was designed for) is largely obsolete these days; having a signet-ring made for you and wearing one is certainly one way to make yourself stand out. If you want a unique, personal piece of jewellery that looks good, think about one of those. After all, class-rings, university rings, school rings and graduation-rings are all descended from this one, humble band of gold with a few knife-scratches in the top of it.