Advice about appearance is handed out freely and almost always ignored. Tie the tie properly. Tuck the shirt in. Above all, find a cufflink that doesn’t look as though it was won at a fairground. And the cufflink, it must be said, has earned its modest reputation. It is a small, fiddly object with exactly one job, which is to hold a cuff together and make a man late for dinner. It is the humble paperclip of menswear. Nobody has ever looked at a pair and thought: “Yes, that is a proper piece of engineering.” Until now. Because a Russian watchmaker has looked at the cufflink, decided it was far too lazy, and given it a calendar. A mechanical calendar, no less, and one the wearer has to operate personally. It is rather wonderful and faintly insulting, because for the first time, a shirt cuff is doing more mathematics than the man inside it.
The man responsible is Konstantin Chaykin, and the product is called Master of Days. To understand why it is clever, you must first understand how a calendar normally works in a watch. It is, by general agreement, one of watchmaking’s most practical complications. It sits alongside the time and helps you keep track of daily life, which in my case means remembering whether it is Tuesday or the weekend I was supposed to be somewhere else. In a conventional watch, the movement does all the thinking. At a set moment, it delivers a little impulse, and the date or day clicks forward. The wearer does nothing. The wearer, frankly, is a passenger.
Also Read: A Guide To Watch Movements: What Does A Gear Train Do?
In the Master of Days, the wearer is the engine. Fasten the cufflink to your shirt cuff and the blue pointer advances to the next day of the week. That’s it. You do the work. In a lovely little twist, you quite literally perform the role of the watch movement, setting the calendar in motion with nothing more than the process of getting dressed. It is a bit like being told you are the engine of a Bugatti, except the Bugatti is an item of jewellery and the horsepower is you not being late.
Look closely and the thing is a small theatre. An anti-reflective sapphire crystal reveals the calendar mechanism, and at the centre sits a seven-pointed star, one point for each day of the week, which advances that vivid blue pointer. It is the focal point of the whole design, and it is gorgeous, in the way a very small and expensive machine is gorgeous. Then there is the finishing, which is where Chaykin’s people have gone slightly mad in the best possible way. Everything is done according to the traditions of haute horlogerie. Components are worked by hand. The mainplate is given a sandblasted texture. The surfaces of the parts are ground and polished. And the edges receive anglage, which is the process of shaping each bevel by hand and polishing it to a mirror finish. Do bear in mind that this is a cufflink. You will lose it on a train.
Even the inside of the case, the bit you will never see once the thing is assembled, is decorated with circular graining. Let me say that again. They have decorated the inside of the box that nobody will ever look at. That is either madness or love, and in watchmaking it is usually both. All told, the finish represents dozens of hours of painstaking work. The case itself is 18MM across and made of titanium, which is light, strong and hypoallergenic, and also extremely difficult to machine precisely, so naturally they picked it. It is polished and satin-finished, 5.7 millimetres thick, with a 15 millimetre sapphire crystal on top. Inside, the calibre is called the A.01-1. It is activated when you fasten the cufflink, measures 13.9 millimetres in diameter and just 2.1 millimetres thick, and runs on two jewels.
The component count is where the sums become properly impressive. Each cufflink contains 40 parts: 13 in the case and 27 in the indication mechanism. A pair therefore contains 80. Every stage of production takes place at the manufacture, from calculating geometry and tolerances to making, decorating and inspecting the parts. After assembly, they check how everything interacts and whether the indication changes accurately. In other words, someone has tested whether your cufflink knows what day it is. Mine, I suspect, would be less reliable.
