Louis Carr can’t remember the first time he bought a pair of cuff links, or even which pair it was. “You don’t go out and make a decision to start collecting them. It’s a much more gradual process. You buy a pair here or there, then all of a sudden, you notice you have a lot,” he explains.
For Carr, president of broadcast sales for Black Entertainment Television, that moment came five years ago when he had a special display case built to hold them all in his Hyde Park home. “That’s the first time I realized I had more than 500 pairs,” he marvels. He started accumulating them about 20 years ago to anchor the French cuffs he favored at the time, and somewhere along the line they became a bit of a passion.
Today, his collection is “split about equally between antiques and new ones, but all are special in one way or another,” Carr explains. For that reason, “I don’t have a favorite pair. I have lots of favorite pairs.” He esteems some for their sentimental value–“they were gifts”–and others for their workmanship, materials, rarity or design.
A huge chunk of his hoard was acquired from a close friend about seven years ago. “He had collected them for years and decided it was time to stop, so I bought them. Now I think of him when I wear the ones that were his,” says Carr.
Thanks to that foundation and the fact that the word is out about his collecting habit, he hardly has had to buy any in recent years. “Once people know you collect them, they give them to you. Now I get them from friends and business associates for almost every occasion,” he explains.
But he did have to figure out a way to store them in plain sight, because “what you don’t see, you don’t wear.” He left the project in the hands of his wife, Diane, and asked her to devise a closet design that would “allow me to see my entire wardrobe all at once, as long as she was at it, because the same goes for your clothes.”
Now his cuff links take center stage in a handsome, glass-topped oak display case that does double-duty by holding incidentals such as socks and underwear in drawers underneath. His suits, shirts and shoes are arrayed around the perimeter of the generously sized closet, so he can see everything he owns, which “makes dressing immeasurably easier,” he maintains.
But the cuff links did pose more of a design challenge than Diane expected. “I had to have the case lined with jewelry display pads so the cuff links could be kept in order and would be discernible. You can’t tell what they look like if they’re lying on their side,” she says.
Today Carr, 46, still wears French cuffs, but “I have them custom made to accommodate the cuff links since some require specially sized holes,” he notes. It’s a far cry from the days when they were merely accessories he acquired to keep the cuffs closed.
