Button

The most probable etymology reminds one of something particularly gentle: the bud of a plant, in Italian “bocciolo,” from the old French “bouton.” A second hypothesis refers to the German “botan,” remembering that in the fourth century the Germans used a sort of small metallic disc to fasten their clothes. However, to tell the story of the button it is not necessary to go back in the mists of time. Even if archaeology tells of prehistoric buttons, classic antiquity didn’t know them. In order to fasten the drapery of peplum, chiton, tunic, stole, and toga, the Greeks and Romans used belts, pins, buckles, and clasps. Not even “lunulae,” the small moon-shaped brooches which, for decorative purposes, were pinned or sewn on robes and “calcei” (Roman shoes similar to ankle boots), were real buttons. It is necessary to go to the 12th and 13th centuries to find the ancestor of the modern “small disc” (and not just discs), which, introduced into a buttonhole, unites the two parts of an article of clothing. Perhaps it was the Crusaders who, once back home, spread the Turkish enthusiasm for fastenings that went from chin to waist and from elbow to knuckles. It is certain, though, that the use of buttons started in France where, in the time of Saint Louis, the “boutonniers” were already organized in guilds, and that the vertical, slender, tight, Gothic silhouette was the reason. Along with this fashion, buttons arrived in Italy around the year 1200. Used very frugally to put on clothes which, strangely enough, were still worn up to the neck, they were needed in order to slip on the elegant and very tight sleeves. Paintings and miniatures document the exaggerations, purely ornamental, of numberless rows of such knobs, or “ma spilli” (pins), as they were called, which ran from wrist to shoulder and continued to become, in the centuries that followed, richer and richer, made of gold, silver, pearls, amber and coral, to the point of being affected by sumptuary laws, which limited the excesses of luxury. They were more and more varied (some in the shape of tiny pears, called peroli), and more and more numerous, both for women and men. In 1400, one could count from 20 to 50 buttons on a sleeve, usually removable and provided with slits and laces. A Sicilian song of the time tells how the author couldn’t find a better comparison with which to address his beloved: “Of gold, of silver, you are my buttons, / buttons of a loving sleeve.” There were also buttons that were less rich, made of bone, wood, horn, and brass. Towards the end of the 1500s, buttons made of copper, brass, iron, pewter and tin began to decorate military uniforms. The Renaissance wanted buttons ever more splendid, encrusted with precious stones and made to order. Manufacturers enjoyed the protection of sovereigns and discovered, from time to time, new techniques to make them unusual. The region of Limoges gave birth to enameled buttons: the first examples were meant for Franµois I of France, who was a “maniac” for buttons, considering that on a single piece of clothing he had 13,600 of them, in gold. Louis XIV, The Sun King, wasn’t much far behind: in fact, for six buttons he paid an amazing sum, even for a king. From century to century, buttons followed the whims of fashion, multiplying themselves on men’s clothing, like the robes of priests in the 1600’s, buttoned from neck to ankle, or like the tailcoats and frock-coats of the 1700’s. They respected, generally speaking, the needs of national manufacture, so that they were silk-covered in France (to protect the factories of Paris and Lyon), and of metal in England, where, in the late 1500s and early 1600s, the use of fabric was prohibited. In England, in the late 1600s and early 1700s, the first industrial button factories were established, and within a short time Birmingham became a center of world renown. Their “run” was by now unstoppable, both in Europe and in America. There would never again be events, trends, personalities, or expressions of public and private life that buttons could not reflect, or shapes and materials which they could not bend to their will. From the pastoral scenes dear to Marie Antoinette to puzzles, with a weakness for sayings and riddles, from exquisite porcelain to the widow’s jet black (ancestor of jet) of Queen Victoria, from celluloid to “very modern” plastic, from the Japanese subjects of Art Nouveau to the straight and squared lines of the 1920s and 1930s, one surprise after another. On the clothes of Elsa Schiaparelli there were “dancing” buttons of such weird shapes that in a biography of the famous couturier one reads: “King button reigns unopposed at Schiaparelli, where no one looks like what a button should look like.” And Mademoiselle Coco Chanel, matching metals and precious pearls and colored stones, even invented a style. The Chanel button has remained unmistakable everywhere at every time. Not even World War II stopped the progress of the button, and there was one who, just to manufacture some, was able to make them from the windshields of obsolete bombers. The second half of the 1900s saw ups and downs, but in its decline, the button rediscovered its essence as a piece of jewellery. As a matter of a fact, designers, worthy heirs of Coco Chanel, make them out of jewels. Thus it doesn’t surprise one that, just as in the 1800s, five or more buttons, all dissimilar and each with a stone of a different color, embellish, for example, one of the showy white shirts of Gianfranco Ferré. Nor it doesn’t amaze one that in his haute couture Collection for Spring-Summer 2003, Jean Paul Gaultier paid a genuine tribute to buttons that run down an entire garment, so that it is studded with them, or, assembled like shells, covered by them entirely. The magic game of a conjurer worthy of his talent, but also of the essense of these decorative and useful “gems.”