Buttons have been attached to clothing for around 5,000 years, but our Bronze Age ancestors used them more for ornamentation than for their potential as a fastener. In their early incarnations, buttons were simply added to clothes for decoration, while the clothes were fastened by pins and belts. The buttons were usually hand-carved from bone, wood, or horn.
It was the Greeks who first came up with the idea of using buttons to fasten clothes. The first "buttonhole" was simply a loop of thread through which a button could be passed to create a fastening.
However, buttons were not adopted in Europe until the return of the Crusaders in the thirteenth century. The introduction of this new fastening coincided with a new trend for "form-fitted" clothing and its popularity soared. By 1250, the French had established the Button Makers' Guild. In fact, the word "button" probably derives from the French bouton meaning "bud," or boater meaning "to push."
Buttons became a status symbol, and the wealthy would wear clothing adorned with hundreds of them. By the sixteenth century the finest buttons were encrusted with precious gems and diamonds, and by the eighteenth century they were being crafted from porcelain, ivory, and glass.
The advent of London's Pearly Kings and Queens, whose costumes are covered by mother-of-pearl buttons, coincided with a huge cargo of the buttons that arrived by ship from Japan in the 1860s. With the dawn of mass-produced buttons, their power as a status symbol diminished and so did their popularity. Most modern buttons are made of plastic, but even today highly priced clothing is often distinguished by unusual ornamental buttons.
