City Cufflinks Brings NYC Design to US

Since November 2015, Dutch design brand City Cufflinks presents its New York design at Project No. 8 in New York City. 

Famous for his eye for details, product and accessory designer Seroj de Graaf dreamed for years of cufflinks appealing to his demanding taste. The Amsterdam-based designer found inspiration in the diversity and beauty of the iconic canal houses in his hometown. This resulted in the Amsterdam Canal Cufflinks. The cufflinks are meant both as a practical quality men’s accessory as well as a pure object of design merely to watch and admire.

The Mayor of Amsterdam acquired the first set, appreciated them and, as they say, the rest is history. The Amsterdam Canal Cufflinks became an instant design classic, available at premium locations in the Netherlands, including de Rijksmuseum. 

The Amsterdam version induced the ideas for a series of world cities. Designer de Graaf co-founded the City Cufflinks brand with business partner Jeroen Pliester. Each separate design captures the essence of a city, creating new shapes and forms, yet with certain design signatures such as the precisely-faceted top of each of the cufflinks.

Now, after the London design, the New York edition has arrived. To de Graaf, New York, aka New Amsterdam, is the “City of Cities” given its vibrant energy. “For me as a designer, NYC is the embodiment of ingenious innovation, combining the New World and the appreciation of the eternal classical style of buildings. I see many similarities when comparing my native Amsterdam to ‘New Amsterdam’.”

In the meantime, City Cufflinks is increasingly visible during renowned “cufflink moments.” A unique twinset of both the Amsterdam Canal Cufflinks, as well as the New York City Cufflinks, was auctioned at the Peter Stuyvesant Ball 2015 at the Plaza Hotel NYC. More recently, on April 21, 2016, two sets were auctioned at the Netherland-America Foundation Ambassadors’ Awards Dinner in Washington, DC: a nice manifestation of the strong ties between the Dutch-American communities. Moreover, these contributions mark the connection between cities, countries and above all, people.

About City Cufflinks

City Cufflinks is a design brand offering a series of world cities designs epitomized in silver. All cufflinks are handmade of the highest quality sterling silver, and are designed by Seroj de Graaf. The first design -of Amsterdam- is available via the leading Dutch department store de Bijenkorf (part of the Selfridges group), the famous Rijksmuseum and various other quality retailers. 

About Project No. 8

Elizabeth Beer & Brian Janusiak formed Various Projects, as a multidisciplinary design collaboration in 2005. The retail arm, Project No. 8 currently has two locations: their Men’s store at 38 Orchard Street, and the Travel/Design/Hotel shop (No. 8a) at the Ace Hotel. The idea was to create a space that was an outlet for things they made but also to be a place to showcase works, by designers and artists, that might be outside of their main occupation; Digressions. Having retail space was a chance for the design studio, Various Projects, to experiment with some themes that reoccurred in their own work: concerns with distribution, collaboration, digression and the creation of fluctuating communities.