‘Buttons sort of grow on you,’ says Maureen Needham, a button collector and member of The British Button Society. ‘I started with a shoe box, then I filled that, so I moved to a boot box, and now I have a big plastic box. I’m still going!’
Buttons have been an important part of fashionable costume for hundreds‘Nowadays, clothes tend to be designed for practicality and comfort, so they use lots of elastic, Velcro and zips. It’s rare for buttons to be a feature – they tend to be mass produced overseas in cheap nylon or polyester, designed to withstand washing machines and aggressive detergents. In years past, people would remove precious buttons before a garment was washed. Or they would transfer a good set of buttons to a new piece of clothing. Of course, a lot of historical buttons were very mundane, and designed to be purely functional, but others were really flamboyant, or like little works of art.’
