How Detroit Made a Home for Cartier — And Got Its Own Buffs
Something magical happens at Detroit Pistons games. Most NBA arenas have kiss cams or dance cams, but there’s a different tradition at the Little Caesars Arena: the swag cam. It’s where Detroiters have the chance to preen for the camera, repping the style that the city is known for, including fur coats, streetwear, and flashy accoutrements. The latter, of course, includes Cartier frames, or as natives call them: “woods,” “wires,” Carties, Yays, and most famously, “buffs.” This month, Cartier built on the tradition with the unprecedented release of 150 pairs of Giverny de Cartier glasses created specifically for Detroit, a first in both the city and the maison's histories.
Looking around the arena, you realize that there is perhaps no other place in the world where you can see so many Cartier frames at once. This year’s 313 Day, an unofficial holiday named after the city’s area code that is celebrated on March 13, was no different, featuring Detroiters from courtside to the nose-bleeds flaunting their frames on the jumbotron.
“It's ingrained in our DNA,” says Amber Lewis, a Detroit native, influencer and community builder, of the glasses. As a Detroit status symbol that transcends class and gender, Cartier frames send the message that not only have you made it, but also that you belong to the city. “Detroit style is a representation of how we feel about ourselves, not about how people feel about us,” says Eric Thomas, the former chief storyteller for the City of Detroit. “I've seen janitors with buffs on. I’ve seen people at the bus stop with a fur coat.”
Pistons player Cade Cunningham, for example, donned a pair of buffs during the 2021 Draft to show he spoke the language of the city; the move earned him respect from Detroit fans. He later bestowed a pair upon Jimmy Fallon. In 2024, the entire Pistons roster was gifted pairs of buffs in the locker room. Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer (happy to be known as “Big Gretch”) and Detroit mayor Mary Sheffield both own a pair. Local rappers like Big Sean, Payroll Giovanni, and Kash Doll have mentioned the eyewear in their songs, as has Buffalo-born (but Detroit-signed) Westside Gunn.
Even the Michigan Wolverines started wearing them — and began playing better. As a native Detroiter, I remember my prom date wearing a pair of Carties; my dad was in the rap group Street Lordz who helped popularize them. “You can't really go anywhere, especially with the Black culture in the city, without seeing people with them on,” Lewis says. “And then you get your own pair.” (I finally got a pair of my own on this trip home for 313 Day, courtesy of Cartier, which felt like a full circle moment and an act of rebellion — I wasn’t allowed to have them when I was younger.)
Cartier itself has a rich history in the eyewear business: founded in 1847, the brand produced bespoke frames for aristocratic clients for nearly a century, launching ready-to-wear eyewear in 1983. Around this time in Detroit, the Black middle class was flush with cash from the auto industry and quickly adopted a style of rimless Cartier glasses as their own, renaming them “buffs” after the buffalo horn that defines the frames’ temples. While city’s auto industry money didn’t last, buffs endured and nestled deeper into the DNA of Detroit, with local hustlers like the Black Mafia Family and rappers like Blade Icewood, The Eastside Cheddah Boyz, and the Street Lordz advancing its lore. As rapper GMAC Cash put it in an interview with CBS News, 90 percent of the rap songs in Detroit reference buffs.
Because ”woods” refer to various types of wood temples and “wires” are crafted with metal, buffs are among the most expensive Cartier frames, though there are numerous finishes and lens shapes to choose from. Regardless, they all start at a minimum of $1,000 — a price point that has never stopped Detroiters, though it has at times made wearing them a risk: there was a period in Detroit where you could be robbed for your glasses, or worse. “One of my friends, we were hooping and he accidentally elbowed me in the eye going up for a rebound; I had a black eye,” says Big Sean. “A few days later, he ended up getting killed over his Cartier glasses and I still had the black eye. It taught me how fast life moved and how dangerous it was.”
The stigma around the glasses has dissipated as Detroit’s crime rates have gone down, but even back then, the city’s loyalty to the frames wasn’t deterred. Owning a pair of Cartier frames was not a blasé luxury acquisition but a rite of passage. “We saved our money for it; we took pride in when we finally earned or got a pair,” says Mia Ray, founder of local fashion label Glam-Aholic Lifestyle. “I realized that early on in high school that that was a part of our Detroit uniform.”
Detroit native and artist Abu Sykes got his first pair in high school, too. “My mom wouldn't buy them for me, so I started to hustle and sell candy in high school and I bought my first pairs,” he says. “They were circular woods. I don't know the name of them, but I used to call them ‘the masterpiece.’ I think I paid like $900, maybe $1,000 dollars.”
Likewise, Big Sean got his first pair secondhand while in high school: “I got some beat-up woods that I paid a few hundred dollars for from my stepbrother. I ended up breaking them, but now I have all sorts of buffs, vintage buffs.”
Lewis, the local community-builder, remembers buying a pair of woods with gold hardware for her golden birthday: “I wore a brown custom-made corset dress with gold chains all over it to look like I was draped in gold, and I wanted a frame that complimented that,” she says. “People usually go with white buffs for their first pair, but I wanted my first pair to fit my personality.”
Gifting a pair of frames is also a rite of passage. Sykes has what he called “a family pair” that have been in his family for at least 30 years. “My granddad had a pair, he gave them to my mom, and then my mom gave them to me.” DJ and Detroit native Sky Jetta was also gifted her first two pairs. “When somebody's doing something crazy, it's like a thing of like, ‘You winning in the city, here's a pair of Buffs, here's a pair of Carties.’”
When I asked people how to describe the city’s style, the word that kept coming up was “flashy.” So it makes sense that Detroiters don’t stop at just buying the frames as is. Many pay extra to make them their own, which can include adding diamonds and custom lens tinting and shapes.
“I remember the first time I went on 106 and Park and they premiered my first video, ‘My Last’ with Chris Brown,” recalls Big Sean, “I pulled out a pair of vintage Cartier buffs that had all these diamonds and stuff that my jeweler did at the time.”
This is where Miami-based, Detroit-born eyewear dealer Spencer Shapiro, also known as the “Board-Certified Cartiologist,” comes in. He got his first pair of woods in high school and became obsessed — he now owns over 30 pairs — and soon began sourcing and designing custom frames, helping to spread the mythology of buffs beyond the city. His clients include Earl Sweatshirt, Young Jeezy, 21 Savage, Sexxy Redd, and Bad Bunny.
“One day, I got a DM from a member of the Cartier team and, basically, they said they’d like to talk and potentially work together. At first, I was like ‘Is this real? Is this a scam?’” says Shapiro. “Once I verified it, I was like ‘Wow, this is really about to happen.’”
This is the Cartier difference. It’s evident that the French maison has built a real relationship with the city of Detroit and locals like Shapiro, most recently via the special release of the 150 pairs of Giverny de Cartier glasses: black, circular buffs with silver framing and a small “313” on the temple, available only at its newly reopened Michigan Cartier boutique. This reaches all the way back to the brand’s relationship with rapper Payroll Giovanni, which started in earnest in 2022 when Cartier sent him a pair of buffs with a letter recognizing "the influence Detroit has had on our eyewear." The brand has also invested in the city's largest museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and hosted an event at the Pistons game for 313 Day. And this January, Cartier reopened its store at Troy's Somerset Mall, which closed in the ‘90s — until now, its frames were usually bought from Optica, a nearby eyewear boutique.
In the history of eyewear, it’s hard to think of another brand, or specific style of frames, so synonymous with a city and its personality. It’s one thing to wear Cartier in the world, but something entirely special to wear a pair of Cartier frames in Detroit, where they obtain a kind of mythic power. As the rapper Skilla Baby puts it: “You could be the ugliest guy in the room, but if you had a pair of buffs, the girls wanted you.”
