On the button: Chanel and Prada love to celebrate the oft-overlooked fastening, with Maison Desrues, God's True Cashmere and Tangxindan among the names supplying extra-fancy versions

South China Morning Post

16-06-2025

What's in a button? We tend to give them little thought. At most, we are irritated when one is lost or comes loose, dangling from the front of a coat or shirt. But like many of the fashion fixtures we take for granted, this unsung hero has a storied past – and present.
Though most of our buttons are now rendered in plastic, wood, metal, pearl, horn and nut, the first ever button was probably made of shell. King & Allen, British bespoke tailors with outposts in Surrey, London, Cheshire and Birmingham, credits the Indus people – a Bronze Age civilisation based in modern-day Pakistan and parts of northwest India – with inventing the button, earliest records of which date back to around 2000BC. Rather than serving a utilitarian purpose, the first buttons were purely ornamental and signalled a person's wealth. By
ancient Roman times , however, they were being used to fix tunics and other draped clothes in place, as well as to decorate them.
Chinese luxury label Tangxindan has launched a line of ceramic buttons. Photo: Handout
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The button's presence has been well documented from then on, from
ancient Egypt to ancient China. As the Tenth Legion, a military-historical re-enactment club with a focus on ancient Rome, notes, sculptural tombstones featuring button-down paenulas (Roman-era cloaks) have been dated back to the first to second century AD. In the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, a marble bust of Roman empress Vibia Sabina from around AD130 clearly shows two buttons joining her robes at the collarbone.
By the Middle Ages, the buttonhole was born, and ornate buttons crafted in precious materials became popular. So popular in fact that in time several countries passed sumptuary laws restricting excessive button-wearing. By the Industrial Revolution, however, buttons (a word taken from the French verb bouter, meaning 'to push') were mass-produced and normalised as an everyday staple.
Today, amid growing disenchantment with luxury – a shift tied to several factors including macroeconomic headwinds and rising prices for high-end goods; an oversaturated market and digital landscape; and growing consumer awareness around labour practises and global supply chains – the button may have a new role. This tiny object could have the answer to what the sector must do to regain its lustre – namely, elevate the small, meticulously crafted elements that can set a luxury item apart.
A Maison Desrues button for Chanel. Photo: Handout
Just ask Sylvain Peters, collection director at Maison Desrues, the atelier of high-end buttons, jewellery and accessories owned by Chanel through its métiers d'art umbrella Le 19M. Peters, who has worked at Desrues for more than 35 years, manages the team responsible for every single button on
Chanel clothes, bags and shoes – from the jewelled buttons shaped like infinity symbols, and sun and stars fashioned by Chanel-owned goldsmith Goossens; through the buttons featuring birds in flight and camellia flowers; to the ever-classic interlocking CC buttons.
'Each collection presents a new challenge – a blank page – where the identity of the show guides our research even before the materials are chosen,' Peters tells Style. 'Every season brings its share of surprises and bold requests from the Chanel fashion creation studio.'
He has a particular fondness for a runway show where he was asked to create a button inspired by an astronaut's helmet, encasing a glass cabochon, or polished gemstone, in a transparent Plexiglas bubble. In fact, Chanel's entire collection for that
spring/summer 2024 haute couture release was inspired by the humble button, starting with the giant UFO-like button suspended over the catwalk in Paris' Grand Palais Éphémère.