Every sewist I know has a button tin. Mine started as my grandmother’s, an old biscuit tin that rattled like treasure when you shook it, full of odd buttons saved from worn out coats and shirts long gone. I still add to it today. We sew buttons on without a second thought, yet that little tin holds one of the longest stories of anything in our sewing room. The history of buttons runs for five thousand years, and along the way the button has been an ornament, a status symbol, a feat of engineering, and finally the quiet, everyday fastener we reach for now.
Ancient Beginnings
The oldest known button is about five thousand years old. It was found in the Indus Valley, near Mohenjo daro in what is now Pakistan, and it was carved from a curved seashell. The surprising part is that it was never meant to fasten anything at all. Early buttons like this were purely decorative, sewn onto cloth as ornament and threaded through a loop or simply admired for their shine. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all wore button like discs and pins as jewellery, but the idea of buttoning a garment closed had not yet arrived.
The Buttonhole Changes Everything
The real turning point came in thirteenth century Germany, with an invention so simple we forget it had to be invented at all: the buttonhole. Once a neatly worked slit could grip a button, the button stopped being mere decoration and became a true fastener. The timing was perfect. Close fitting clothing had just come into fashion across Europe, and rows of buttons let tailors shape a garment snugly to the body in a way that laces and pins never could. Sleeves, bodices, tunics, and even shoes were suddenly buttoned from wrist to elbow and chin to waist.
A Symbol of Wealth and Power
Because each button was made by hand from precious materials, buttons quickly became a way to show off. Medieval nobles wore buttons of gold, silver, ivory, and gemstone, sometimes stitching dozens onto a single sleeve purely for display. The fashion grew so extravagant that some European cities passed laws limiting how many buttons a person of a given rank was allowed to wear. By the sixteenth century, button makers in France had formed their own guilds, guarding their craft and its rules as jealously as any trade, and the French army used buttons to mark rank and regiment on a uniform.
Buttons for Everyone
For most of history a button was a small luxury, but the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century changed that for good. New machines could stamp, mould, and finish buttons by the thousand, and prices tumbled. Birmingham in England became a great centre of button manufacture, turning out gleaming metal and shell buttons for a growing middle class and for the uniforms of expanding armies. For the first time, ordinary working families could fasten their clothes with buttons rather than knots, pins, or laces.
The Modern Button
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought a flood of new materials. Makers carved buttons from vegetable ivory, the hard nut of the tagua palm, then experimented with glass, with shell, and finally with the first true plastics. Cheerful Bakelite buttons became collectibles in their own right, and today most everyday buttons are moulded from polyester or nylon, with natural shell and horn saved for finer garments. The zipper and later the hook and loop tape gave the button some competition, yet nothing has ever truly replaced it. A well chosen button still finishes a garment the way nothing else can.
A Small Thing With a Long Memory
So the next time you tip out that button tin and hunt for a match, remember that you are handling one of the oldest ideas in all of sewing, refined over five thousand years from a polished shell into the clever little fastener on your favourite blouse.
All this button talk has a way of sending you straight back to your sewing machine. If you would like to make your own, we have two easy guides to homemade buttons:
And when it comes to sewing them on and picking the right one for a project, these two are well worth a read:
For still more, see our roundup of 125+ sewing projects using buttons, learn to stitch a neat buttonhole with the buttonhole foot, meet the queen of button collections, or simply browse our free sewing patterns. And if you enjoy a little sewing history, the story of the hussif makes a lovely next read.
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