Vintage Hickok Cherry Red Cabochon Cufflinks, Pair, c. 1945–1960

The Piece

A pair of gold-tone cufflinks set with deep cherry-red domed cabochons, by Hickok of Rochester, New York. The colour is the whole point: dark garnet in shadow, and lit from the side it goes clear and glowing like a cough drop held to a window.

Each cabochon sits in a plain polished bezel with a narrow rolled lip, mounted on a stepped disc that steps down again to a reeded stem. The stem carries three crisp parallel flutes running its length, and it hinges into a rounded toggle bar with matching reeding along the top. It is a streamlined design with no ornament that is not also structure, which is why it still looks modern.

Fine bubbles are suspended through the red, visible when the light goes through it, which is what you get from a poured or cast material rather than a cut stone.

Both links are stamped HICKOK U.S.A. in small block capitals on the inner face of the toggle bar.

History & Provenance

Hickok was a Rochester, New York maker of men's accessories. Stephen Rae Hickok started the business in 1909 and incorporated it in May 1917, working first out of the Cox Building on St. Paul, then North Water Street, and from 1924 the old M. B. Schantz factory at Monroe and Rutgers. It made buckles, cufflinks and tie clips, and later wallets, belts and suspenders, with branches in New York, Chicago and Toronto.

Two dates matter for a pair like this. In 1934 the designer Edwin N. Vogel joined the firm and pushed it into properly designed men's jewellery rather than plain findings, which is where a piece with this much attention to the stem and the toggle comes from. And in 1950 Hickok created the Hickok Belt, the alligator and solid gold trophy given annually to the Professional Athlete of the Year until 1976, which put the name in every sports page in the country and made it a mark men recognised.

The design language sets the rest. The stepped disc and the reeded stem are streamlined moderne, the idiom that carried from the late 1930s through the post-war decade, and the toggle-bar fitting is the standard American dress fitting of that period. This was also the high tide of the cufflink itself: French cuffs were ordinary business dress from the 1940s until button cuffs took over through the 1960s.

The pair is offered as c. 1945 to 1960.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Red cufflinks are the easy version of a hard thing. A man who will not wear a pocket square will wear these, because they only show when he moves, and against a white cuff and a dark sleeve the colour reads as deliberate rather than loud.

They also work as objects. A pair of marked American cufflinks from the period when cufflinks mattered sits well in a tray on a dresser, in a shadow box with a watch and a lighter, or in a case behind glass. Hickok is a name worth having on them.