101 Buttons

I've been working on buttons again after many years distracted by other pursuits.  I'm always amazed at how much more information is available now.

I'm a huge fan of Gina Barrett's book Buttons: A Passementerie Workshop Manual published in 2013.  It is focused on how to make a variety of buttons and includes some historical examples, but I found myself missing a view of what buttons were used in a particular historical period.  So, I started collecting pictures and a list of buttons that I could reasonably date and determine the button type or method of working.

I'm up to over 100 buttons, but have grown to include some cast / metal buttons and even a few of glass.

There are 3 main questions I was trying to answer:
1. What are the passementerie types in use between ~1550 - 1650?
2. What are the typical button sizes and do they vary by type? 
3. Are there any identifiable trends?

Let's take a look at what we see:

First, a couple of notes.
1. This is not a count of individual buttons.  If a doublet has 25 buttons all of the same size and construction, I counted this a 1 distinct button.
2. The estimated date is an average of a date range for ease of charting.  This works pretty well for garments which are often dated to a 20 year range or so.

I have 112 distinct buttons so far.  There are many more buttons out there from this period, but I have been unable to find sizes or construction method details, so have not included them.  Just under half are metal or glass.  Most of the metal buttons are quite loosely dated, so I have mostly discounted these for understanding button trends over time.  However, most of the textile buttons are fairly tightly dated.

If we consider textile buttons with a published size and identifiable construction technique, there are only 30.  The chevron and evenweave buttons are the most common of the examples I could find.  I've collected as many publicly available pictures of these buttons on a Pinterest board for easy reference.

Chevron button example

Evenweave button example

See my Button Board on Pinterest for more pictures.

It's difficult to see any button trends, but it does appear that evenweave buttons tend to be on the larger side (<10 mm), while chevron buttons tend to be smaller (<10 mm) with one large exception.  We do know from portraiture that there was a trend for "big" buttons in mid-1580's England, but don't have enough extant buttons to see that here.

Let's dig into the size question a bit more:

We really don't have enough glass examples to draw any conclusions, but we have a number of metal buttons.  These almost form a bell curve with the most common size being around 12 mm.  Our sizing of textile buttons is a bit more limited in samples, but the overall median size is 12mm.  However, it actually looks like we have two clusters, with the two centers around 10mm and 17mm.

That's it for now.  I'm prepping to make a bunch of buttons and hope to post pictures of the process.

The Hessian Costume Collection

I came across a reference today to a doctoral thesis on a collection of garments at the Hessian State Museum.  One of the doublets included is detailed in Arnold's Patterns of Fashion, and I've never been able to find additional details about it.

It contains patterns and construction details for each of the garments along with analysis of the historical context.  I was a bit disappointed that there don't seem to be details (like the size or construction method) for any buttons, but it's still very impressive and I'm thrilled to have found it.

Oh, I should mention that it's in German.

I searched for the terms I was interested in and used google translate to understand the sentences around them.  So, it's very possible that I missed something.

The Costume Historian has a great overview including the list of 23 garments, and the full thesis can be found here.