Robert Tateossian makes no secret of his distaste for the conventional. “If it’s been done before, then there’s no point in me doing it,” he tells me. It’s this pursuit of distinction that underpins his accessories line, Tateossian, which he founded in 1990 after years of studying and working in the vastly disparate world of finance, within which he identified a niche that needed filling. “For most people, if you were really serious about your job, you wore cufflinks,” he says. “But the cufflinks that were available at the time were just the traditional monogrammed cufflinks that maybe were passed from father to son through generations, you know, double ended with a chain. There was no novelty. And most people wore the same type of cufflinks day in and day out.”
As a response, he set out to create cufflinks that enabled men to distinguish themselves and express their personality, in the same way that he had witnessed happening with ties. “All the bankers wore Hermès ties and everyone would be after a new Hermès tie every couple of months, but their cufflinks always remained the same, so I thought, well why not make something out of it and create something a little bit different?” So he did, and Tateossian has since become internationally renowned for its boundary pushing designs and innovative use of materials across its cufflinks and jewellery. “Nobody - well at least not our clients - wants something that everybody else has,” he says. “They want something special, something that’s unique, and that really is what defines a lot of the pieces that we do - it’s designs that are completely unique, that stand out.”
