Before the button, clothing was fastened with pins, brooches, laces, and knots. These methods worked, but they imposed constraints: a garment that must be tied shut at the wrist cannot be cut as closely to the arm as one that buttons. The button and its corresponding buttonhole — which sounds simple but requires a reinforced, precisely cut aperture in the fabric — together made a new kind of fitted clothing possible, and their arrival in Europe in the 13th century is one of the less-celebrated turning points in the history of dress.
Where buttons came from before their European appearance is not entirely clear. Buttons used as ornament rather than fastening are ancient — there are examples from the Indus Valley civilisation dating to around 2000 BCE, made from shell and used decoratively on garments. Functional buttons, with the vertical shaft or shank that allows them to pass through a hole, appear in Europe from the early 13th century, possibly introduced through contact with the Islamic world, where they were in use somewhat earlier. By the late 13th century, they were common enough in northern Europe that guild regulations for button-makers were being established in Paris.
The Material Question
Buttons have been made from an extraordinary range of materials: bone, antler, shell, glass, jet, amber, precious metals, ivory, mother-of-pearl, tortoiseshell, ceramics, wood, and, since the 20th century, a bewildering variety of plastics. The material communicates something about the garment it fastens — brass buttons on a naval coat say something different from fabric-covered buttons on a silk evening jacket — and the button trade has historically been closely tied to the luxury goods market.
Mother-of-pearl buttons, cut from the shells of freshwater mussels, became one of the most important button industries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Mississippi and Ohio river basins in the United States were rich in freshwater mussels, and from the 1890s onward a substantial industry developed to harvest them, cut blanks from the shells, and turn those blanks into buttons. At its peak, the American pearl button industry employed tens of thousands of people and produced billions of buttons annually. It collapsed almost entirely after 1945, when plastic — specifically casein buttons initially, then polyester — produced a product so much cheaper that the economics of shell cutting became untenable.
The Pearly Kings
The tradition of Pearly Kings and Queens in London — market traders whose costumes are covered with hundreds of mother-of-pearl buttons — dates from the 1880s and is attributed to a road sweeper named Henry Croft, who covered a suit with found buttons and wore it for charity fundraising. The tradition spread through the costermonger community of London street traders and has been maintained into the present day. It is a reminder that buttons, whatever their social function as fasteners of fine garments, also found their way into popular and working-class decorative culture — sewn in their hundreds onto anything flat enough to hold them.
What the Buttonhole Made Possible
Return, though, to the functional revolution. Before the button, the draped and layered clothing of antiquity and the early medieval period made a virtue of looseness — it covered and adorned the body without requiring precise measurements or close fitting. The tailored, fitted clothing of the later medieval period and the Renaissance required a fastening that could hold a close-cut seam shut. The button provided it. The close-fitting doublet of the 15th century, the tightly sleeved gown, the many-buttoned coat of the 17th century — none of these garments are conceivable without the button. In this sense the history of Western fitted dress is, among other things, a history of the button. A small object, moving very quietly through history, and carrying a great deal.