The OG fashion icon: Hobbyists collect, preserve and showcase buttons
Photos: Katherine Mansfield/Observer-Reporter
Syliva Whiten’s husband, Bob Whiten, has his own, small collection of buttons from his firefighter parade coat. He has served with the Charleroi Fire Department for 60 years.
Katherine Mansfield/Observer-Reporter
Sylvia Whiten keeps her buttons neatly organized in plastic and nostalgic containers, like this original Lidz Brothers box and an old, gifted tin.
Katherine Mansfield/Observer-Reporter
Among Sylvia Whiten’s button collection are cards of buttons women used to purchase in stores, to add flair to garments. Today, collectors typically display their buttons on 9-by-12-inch card stock.
Katherine Mansfield/Observer-Reporter
Sylvia Whiten admires a tin filled with buttons in her Charleroi home. Whiten has always loved buttons, began collecting in earnest during college and has never stopped.
Cathy Snyder peruses “The Complete Button Book” during the monthly Bethel Park Library Button Club meeting April 26. Meetings begin at 11 a.m. the fourth Wednesday of each month and include education, crafting, Q&A and socialization.
Katherine Mansfield/Observer-Reporter
Katherine Mansfield/Observer-Reporter
Cathy Snyder, right, and Anne Valentino admire and discuss head buttons, or portrait buttons, during the Bethel Park Button Club meeting April 26. Snyder collects and crafts with her buttons, while Valentino, who does not collect buttons, attends meetings to appreciate others’ collections and learn more about buttons and history.
Katherine Mansfield/Observer-Reporter
Ladies admire head buttons, or portrait buttons, during a Bethel Park Button Club meeting at the library (peep the QEII button in the top row). One member said they’ve learned more about history through buttons than reading.
Beverly Calvert turned a button collection into home decor, using Americana-type buttons to create a lovely lamp for her Washington home's guest room. Buttons have for decades served as fashion and design statements.
Gina Powers' mother hand-made plaster Alice in Wonderland buttons for a Keystone Button Club festival, and Powers keeps the entire six-button set safely in her own collection. Powers said buttons allow miniature artists, many of whom are working in buttons today, to really shine.
One of the best parts of attending a button convention is the competition. Collectors choose from a list of themes, curate a competition card and submit their card, complete with each button's description, like what material it is made of, to judges for the chance to win small prizes and, more importantly, share their button collection. Gina Powers submitted (and took home first place for!) a dog button card at a recent competition.
Like her mother, Marie Trossman keeps her buttons in a tin, and has a few favorites, like those she's holding in this image. Trossman began collecting buttons out of habit and continues to keep the extra buttons that come on clothing and other neat pieces.
When her mother passed away last year, Marie Trossman requested the button collection, which includes loose buttons, leather buttons, and buttons still on their original cards. Trossman said there's something about her mother's buttons, pictured here, that binds her to her memories.
From status symbol to curious collectible and everything in between, the button, that underrated but oh-so-important part of clothing, is preserved locally by enthusiasts who revel in the joys of sharing and swapping buttons.
“Not everyone would do this,” said Sylvia Whiten, dumping a container of green buttons on her Charleroi living room table. “Not everyone would take the time to go through these and to look at them. They’re very meaningful to me.”
Whiten’s collection consists of hundreds of thousands of buttons kept neatly in color-coded containers, which she pulls out from time to time to admire – and show off.
“It’s very cool to share them,” she said. “I’m very proud of it.”
Whiten’s earliest button memories date to childhood: She vividly remembers playing with the buttons in her grandmother’s sewing tin.
“I would put them out on the floor in different groups and different sizes. There’d be just every color, every size, just everything. I really thought I had the world, something wonderful, because they just meant so much,” Whiten said.
As she grew, so too did Whiten’s collection. Her passion for buttons led her to the Bethel Park Button Club, which meets at 11 a.m. the fourth Wednesday of each month inside the library to show, tell, learn and socialize.
At the April meeting, ladies gathered ’round a conference table, trying to determine what was depicted on a tiny button (hummingbird, perhaps?) before opening “The Complete Button Book,” a reference title used that day to study head buttons, or portrait buttons.
Meetings often are a mix of education – sometimes, members or guests deliver presentations – question-and-answer sessions that help folks dive deeper into their own collections, crafting (members create lovely jewelry and home décor from buttons) and chatting.
“I saw an article … that they were starting a button club what, seven, eight years ago. I had just retired and was looking for something to do,” said Cathy Snyder, of Bethel Park. “And here I am.”
Snyder, who has used her buttons for everything from handmade jewelry to a lovely piece of framed wall art, said the most fascinating aspect of buttons, for her, is their history.
Indeed, to trace the button’s history is in a way to follow the rise and fall of empires, fashion and art trends.
The earliest buttons date to about 2,000 B.C. They were discovered in the Indus Valley (now Pakistan) and made from shells. Big, decorative buttons fastened to material were fashionable in Ancient Rome, while ancient Egyptians secured clothing with cloth buttons.
Throughout history, buttons have been hand- and machine-crafted from every material imaginable – bone, pewter, tin and wood among them – and designed to be plain, to share status, to tell stories and to commemorate history. And while the button has evolved through the ages, it wasn’t until the Middle Ages that buttons in the modern sense emerged.
“There was an article on the most important inventions of all time, and they had the button in there. I would have to say it wasn’t the button – it was the button hole. The button didn’t become a button until the button hole came around,” said Gina Powers, a New Kensington resident and president of the Keystone Button Club. “Some genius invented the button hole, and then they really took off as actual buttons as we know now.”
Middle Age fashion introduced tighter clothing, made possible through buttoning. The more buttons on a garment, the tighter the fit.
“In Europe, they became so popular that they had to put out laws concerning the use of buttons. People of a certain class were allowed to wear so many buttons, and if you did not have enough money, you were not allowed to wear buttons at all,” Powers said.
Queen Victoria famously mourned her beloved Prince Albert for 40 years, and often decorated her black dresses with black glass buttons, which trended during her lifetime and today make lovely additions to button collections.
“A lot of us do it because it’s affordable art,” said Susie Smith, public relations for the National Button Society, which includes most U.S. clubs and several in Canada, where Smith lives. “You can buy a really nice button for $30 or you can buy a really nice button for $2, or you can buy a really, really nice button for $2,000.”
Like Snyder, Smith finds the history of buttons fascinating, and appreciates learning world history through buttons. Once, Smith scored a free card of six buttons on the condition she research and present her findings on the buttons.
The buttons were labeled Manton patent, with which Smith was unfamiliar.
“I did absolutely nothing for six months,” Smith laughed.
Then, a colleague found a leather powder horn from Fort Henry in his family’s heirlooms and asked Smith to donate it to the fort. The horn belonged to William S. Manton, master armorer at the fort in 1850, and came with a genealogy book.
“I was sitting reading the book; sure enough, page four, there it was. John S. Manton was the man’s father, and he started the Manton Button Company in England,” Smith said. “Once you get started …”
Button collecting is as involved or casual as individuals desire. Powers laughed that her mother and aunt “weaseled me into it,” when they requested she drive them to their meetings.
“I came to love (buttons). When somebody starts coming along, it’s inevitable there’s something that’s going to catch your eye or your interest. It’s accessible, it’s affordable, it covers every art form you can imagine,” she said. “It can take you a lot of places and you can meet a lot of people, (or) you can just be the kind of collector that just collects buttons at home by yourself.”
Which is what Marie Trossman, of North Strabane, does.
“My mother was a sewer, so she always was buying fabric and … buttons and zippers and things. Anything that was left over from a project, she had a little tin box where she kept those things. Any time you bought clothing, an extra button was attached; you better save that,” said Trossman. “Just out of habit of growing up with that, I started doing that.”
When her parents passed away last year, Trossman, who doesn’t sew much these days and rarely pulled out her button collection, found her mom’s collection; memories of working on projects alongside her mom floated through Trossman’s mind, and she couldn’t part with the tin filled to brimming with buttons.
“My one niece took her sewing machine. I’m like, can I have the button collection? There’s certain things from your past you just don’t want to let go of,” Trossman said. “It brings you bonding to your memories. When my kids were little and we would go visit my mom, my kids were fascinated by the buttons. My mom would play little games with them, sort by color. There are times when I think it’s interesting to look at designs and styles of things. Looking at some of the styles of the buttons, you can see where it’s ’70s clothing versus ’80s. I can recall certain things my mom sewed and used the buttons for. Some of my nieces picked out some really cool designed ones. It was a really cool memory keepsake for them.”
Also a neat keepsake: Beverly Calvert’s button lamp, an eclectic piece of home décor made from buttons collecting dust in a box.
“It’s kind of quirky and old-fashioned,” said Calvert, of Washington. “I was moving to a new place and I was going to have a red, white and blue room. I needed a lamp to put beside the bed and I got the idea to make it out of a canning jar and a light kit. I took the buttons that I had in my sewing box that I’ve had for years – I don’t know where they came from, I just kind of accumulated them – and I decided to fill it up with the buttons.”
The lamp has stood proudly, lighting Calvert’s guest room, for nearly two decades. Calvert chose her buttons carefully, picking out those with Americana flair.
Those buttons are the lamp’s signature, an homage to designers who use unique buttons to brand their garments. Buttons are functional fashion, a bridge between past and present, a history lesson and a memory – and those interested in learning more about their buttons are welcome to attend a Bethel Park Button Club meeting, the last Wednesday of the month at BPPL.
For more information on, or to join, the Keystone Button Club, visit https://keystonebuttonclub.com/.
Learn more about the National Button Society online at https://www.nationalbuttonsociety.org/.