Cuff links have a simple purpose, but their innumerable forms reflect their owners’ personalities and manufacturers’ ingenuity. After decades of neglect from academics, they are coming to the fore in museum shows and private collections.  Richard G. Porter, a marketing consultant in Brooklyn, has filled an upstairs room in his townhouse with about 3,500 pairs of cuff links, most from the mid-20th century. “They’re like little canvases,” he said.  He organizes them by material, color, designer, nationality and subject matter. During a recent tour, he opened one of his dozens of drawers and revealed a blaze of red, teal and blue rectangles. He asked me, “You’re ready for some German enamel cuff links?”  Other materials in his collection include pewter, copper, turquoise, agate and lapis lazuli. Sports are represented in the form of tiny windsurfers and badminton shuttlecocks, and he has acquired some oddities, like helicopters, pencil stubs, abacuses and matchbooks. “I do have a little gambling theme section,” he said, bringing out cuff links shaped like stacks of playing cards with tiny dice inside.  Mr. Porter has spent up to a few thousand dollars apiece for cuff link pairs; his priciest acquisitions, made of gold and amethyst, were designed by Art Smith, a Greenwich Village artisan. Among Mr. Porter’s other favorite makers are the artist Victoria Flemming, who drizzled gold streaks on glass, and William Spratling and Antonio Pineda, whose silver workshops in Mexico catered to Hollywood celebrities. He owns about 200 products from Fenwick & Sailors, a company based in Hollywood known for novelty cuff links in the form of telephones, microphones, oil derricks and horses’ behinds.  At business meetings, he said, “They’re a great little icebreaker.” They help form connections between strangers. “They hold things together. There’s absolutely a metaphor in there,” he said.  He sometimes buys tie clips and tie tacks that match his cuff links, and he owns a few singleton cuff links. “My fantasy is somehow finding the match,” he said.  Barry Harwood, the decorative arts curator at the Brooklyn Museum, pored over the Porter drawers a few weeks ago. “I completely admire that sort of tenacity” in collecting, he said. Mr. Porter has given the museum a pair of copper cuff links that resemble African tribal masks; they were designed by Winifred Mason Chenet, a Brooklyn-born modernist coppersmith who mentored Art Smith. She spent years in Haiti, and returned to the United States in the 1960s after soldiers killed her husband, Jean Chenet. (Nancy Till, a design historian in New York, is planning to publish recently unearthed details of Ms. Chenet’s largely forgotten career.)  The Brooklyn Museum will soon display Mr. Porter’s Chenet cuff links. As rare examples of modernist jewelry for men, and rare examples of jewelry for men designed by a woman, Mr. Harwood said, “the cuff links expand the gender realm; they totally open up and broaden the presentation.”  In a new book, “Precious Cufflinks: From Pablo Picasso to James Bond,” the jewelry historian Walter Grasser and the goldsmith Franz Hemmerle point out that “only very few cuff links have found their way into public collections and museums.” The book, also written by the art historian Alexander von Württemberg, describes their origins: 17th-century European aristocrats slipped gemstones attached by chains through their cuff buttonholes. From the 1870s to the 1910s, Czar Nicholas II made sketches of cuff links that he received as gifts. He owned well over 100 pairs, “all of which are sadly lost today,” Mr. von Württemberg writes.  The Missing Link, a specialty store on West 25th Street in Manhattan, has preserved original boxes with 20,000 cuff links for sale. They are arrayed in categories with labels like “Art Deco Enamels” and “Victorian Bean Backs.” The materials include Egyptian scarabs, Wedgwood porcelain wafers and blood-red feldspar cylinders flecked with gold. The store owner, Michael Rodriguez, and his assistant, Tom Dziadual, can explain which cuff link shapes were favored by celebrities like Gary Cooper and Bing Crosby, and how designers over the centuries have tinkered with cuff link formats by adding snaps, toggles, pivoting bars and straps.  During a tour, Mr. Dziadual pointed out a shelf full of crystal cuff links the size of golf balls. “We have a televangelist who wears those,” he said. Another client keeps breaking one cuff link and seeking replacements. He is known, Mr. Dziadual said, as “the lefty destroyer.”  Mr. Rodriguez has 20,000 additional cuff links tucked away in his private collection. He said he planned to write a book about them and create museum displays.  A few institutions keep cuff links on view. They appear on clothing in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s survey of men’s wear, “Reigning Men,” on display through Aug. 21. The Yale University Art Gallery has brought out gold oval cuff links made around 1840, and the Newark Museum is showing examples made of sapphires and mastodon ivory.  One particularly important pair of cuff links, worn by George Washington during one of his inauguration ceremonies, is in the University of Hartford’s holdings of political memorabilia. The collection, amassed by J. Doyle DeWitt, an insurance executive, was long displayed in the university’s Museum of American Political Life, which closed in 2004. The university has been trying to sell the collection, which is costly to maintain in storage; its potential dispersal has caused legal controversy. John Carson, a university spokesman, said its fate has not been decided. Washington’s cuff links remain in limbo.  A version of this article appears in print on July 22, 2016, on page C21 of the New York edition with the headline: Holding Things Together: Cuff Links as Reflections of Their Owners. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Cuff links, which serve an aesthetic yet functional purpose, are taking on a more prominent role in museums and private collections.