The Coat Route (18 page)

W
ith the coat progressing nicely, it was time to consider the buttons. They, of course, were not to be taken lightly. The correct buttons spoke volumes, albeit sotto voce. They said, to those who understood such things, “This is a proper garment made with proper attention to details.” Buttons mattered immensely
.

There was never a question in John’s mind about what kind of buttons to use for the vicuña coat. They simply must be crafted of water-buffalo horn. That was the only choice for a garment of this quality. Now it was a matter of selecting the color, size, and style
.

John got out display cards that he had from Richard James Weldon, a London firm that had been supplying bespoke tailors since 1826. It was where one went for one’s trimming needs—from kilt pins to collar meltons. He looked over the horn buttons. John preferred a matte finish, rather than shiny. More elegant, he thought. He pondered the color choices: navy or black. Navy would be the more subtle selection, blending, as it would, with the cloth. Keith, he felt certain, would prefer navy
.

He chose eight of the size 23 for the cuffs, four for each side. The buttonholes on the sleeve would be real open holes. Some tailors made a fake hole for the top button, to allow for lengthening later on if the sleeves prove to be too short. John wasn’t worried. He was certain the sleeves were the right length. He wanted size 40 for the three main front buttons. The button at the neck and the button in the center vent would be size 30, to avoid bulkiness
.

John jotted down the style numbers. Richard James Weldon would no doubt source the buttons from James Grove & Sons, a manufacturer in England’s West Midlands, which was considered the best horn-button maker in the world. No other buttons would do
.

“I
t is a bit peculiar,” Peter Grove says as he steers his compact car through a roundabout on the way out of Birmingham on a sunny, cold November morning. The soft-spoken, bald sixty-three-year-old, wearing khakis and a raspberry crewneck sweater, seems puzzled by my visit, even after my many emails explaining my wish to see where the horn buttons John Cutler used to trim Keith Lambert’s coat were made. I have the feeling, as we drive toward his factory in the suburban town of Halesowen, that he can’t quite believe I actually turned up in the hotel lobby where we had arranged to meet this morning.

Halesowen—or “
Hells-own
,” in the local dialect—is on no one’s list of must-see snug English villages. It sprawls on the southwest edge of the Black Country, a coal-mining region in the low hills of the West Midlands. Settled in Saxon times, the town no doubt spent its first several hundred years picturesquely
enough: fields golden with barley and wheat, pastures dotted with flocculent sheep and sturdy cattle, and woodlands full of fallow deer and meaty parasol mushrooms. There were half-timbered houses on the narrow lanes and, under a canopy of bent trees, the little River Stour burbled along cool and undisturbed, except for the occasional rise of a fish. The weekly market, held in the town center every Monday, was a carnival of hawkers pushing bread and eggs and freshly butchered pigs. By the late eighteenth century, though, Halesowen had become a very different place. Industry had arrived and brought with it the smoke and soot that, along with the veins of black coal in the ground, gave the region its name.

“
The men, women, children, country and houses are all black … the grass is quite blasted and black,” thirteen-year-old Princess Victoria wrote in her diary after passing through the area in 1832, five years before she took the throne. “The country is very desolate … engines flaming, coals, in abundance everywhere, smoking and burning coal heaps, intermingled with wretched huts and carts and little ragged children.”

In
The Old Curiosity Shop
, published in 1841, Charles Dickens painted a similarly grim scene of a fictionalized Black Country town. “On every side, and far as the eye could see into the heavy distance, tall chimneys, crowding on each other, and presenting that endless repetition of the same dull, ugly form, which is the horror of oppressive dreams, poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air.”

In those early days of manufacturing, the Black Country’s men, women, and children labored into the night over back-yard anvils or in dismal foundries, shaping the bits that held the increasingly complex world together. They made bolts and rivets and springs and chains and anchors—including the three fifteen-ton
ones for the
Titanic
, which, one local observer noted, were the only things on the ill-fated ship that actually worked.

Halesowen’s biggest and, by all accounts, grimmest industry was nail making. Entire families worked in heat and filth, pounding nails out of hot iron rods. Every evening they trudged up Bundle Hill, where middlemen known as foggers were waiting to weigh and inspect the day’s output. More often than not, the scales were rigged and the nailers’ meager wages were paid in “truck”; that is, credit rather than cash, which was good only in overpriced pubs or shops that were owned by the foggers themselves.

When machines started to make the handmade nail obsolete, some of the people of Halesowen, including James Grove, Peter Grove’s great-great-grandfather, went to work making buttons. James had an apprenticeship with Thomas Harris, who specialized in compression-molded buttons of animal horn and hoof. When Harris got into financial trouble, James left to open his own button factory in a rented timber-framed house in the center of Halesowen. He faced stiff competition. There were more than a hundred button makers in the Midlands, but James was a talented diesinker and a good businessman, and his operation flourished. Seven years later, he built a larger factory, at a site called Bloomfield, on Stourbridge Road.

Peter turns in to a driveway. Behind a heavy metal gate, I can see a new-looking building, blocky and featureless as a public storage facility. To the left of the entranceway, surrounded by a rusting wire fence interwoven with dead vines, are the last skeletal brick walls of Bloomfield Works, the old button factory built by James Grove. Most of it was recently demolished to make way for a modern plant that would meet safety codes.

The gutted old building’s windows are spray-painted with
graffiti and the glass in its front door is shattered, as if it had been struck by a large rock thrown with ferocity. Just below the roofline, carved in stone relief, are four water-buffalo heads. Their horn-framed faces suggest nobility and power, even as they gaze down on the BP gas station across Stourbridge Road. It is impossible to look at the factory grounds and not be struck by how succinctly it telegraphs a twenty-first-century tale: the soulless modernity, the beautiful ruin.

“I hate it,” Peter says as we walk into the new building. “The old factory had character. But we had no choice. We had to move or we would have closed.”

In the small lobby, a table holds a shallow ceramic bowl full of buttons—mostly mottled brown disks and paler fang-shaped toggles, with a few coins of vivid color. On the wall, a framed photograph shows an aerial view of the old factory. It was a maze of narrow interconnected buildings with two smokestacks at its center, as dark and forbidding as an asylum.

“We had a ghost in the old place,” Peter says as I follow him up a flight of stairs. “If you walked the factory at night, it seemed like there was someone behind you, but when you looked back no one was there. I didn’t believe it till I felt it myself. It was quite eerie, really. I’ve been told the ghost will come back,” he adds, with a bright note I interpret as hope.

On the second level of the building, there are several gray desks lined up near plate-glass windows that look down over the open hangar-like production room. I see a few men on the factory floor attending to rows of machines—some boxy, with modern-looking dials and controls, others that are hand-operated and appear old enough to be blackened with Victorian-era grease. At one end are two lines of large wooden barrels, spinning slowly like drums turning raffle tickets. And everywhere there are metal
bins filled with brown disks—horn buttons in various stages of production. I ask Peter about the size of his staff.

“We are, at present, down to twenty-five.”

“Down from?” I say.

“Six hundred, at our peak. When every button was made by hand.”

N
o one knows exactly when or where the first buttons were made. Four- to five-thousand-year-old buttonlike objects have been unearthed in the Indus Valley, China, and ancient Rome, but they were likely used as ornaments, not as fasteners. Man found other ways to keep his clothes from flapping in the wind; heat-hardened thorns or sharpened slivers of animal leg bone, at first, then metal pins or nub-and-loop closures later. It wasn’t until early in the thirteenth century that buttons with buttonholes began to appear in European dress.

Historians can’t say who cut that first little slit into fabric, tipped an anchored button through the opening, and felt it settle snug and fast against the two layers of cloth. One thing is certain, though: buttonholes changed everything.

“Buttonholes! There is something lively in the very idea of ’em,” Laurence Sterne wrote in
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
. And there was. Thanks to the buttonhole, clothing became more than just draped fabric. Functional buttons allowed garments to be crafted so that they followed the contours of the body. The human shape, once concealed, was now visible and—with the help of a talented tailor—even enhanced. (The words “tailor,” from
tailler
—“to cut”—and “button,” from
bouter
—“to thrust”—appeared at about the same time.)

The change in clothing mirrored a societal shift as well. The collective focus was turning to the secular world, where outward appearances and the glory of the individual were to be celebrated above all. Buttons were also practical, providing a close fit that protected the wearer from cold. The historian Lynn White suggests that buttons even helped dramatically improve the infant-mortality rate during the Middle Ages—and, in general, played a part in changing parental attitudes toward children. At that time, some historians say, parents paid little attention to their very young offspring, because the emotional toll would be so great if the children died young, which they often did.
White wrote that the development of functional buttonholes, along with knitting and crude heating devices, kept more little children alive—and helped foster modern attitudes toward them.

As functional, even lifesaving, as buttons may have been, they also quickly became both status symbols for the élite and an important new medium for artisans. Working in everything from bone to enamel and precious gems, members of button guilds turned out stunning miniature works of art. The finest buttons were reserved for the aristocracy. Sumptuary laws, which placed limits on who could spend and wear what, were enacted in order to protect guild members and to keep people from dressing above their station. Officials were allowed to search people’s homes and arrest offenders who were in possession of the outlawed buttons.

Button fever raged among the sixteenth-century ruling class. In 1520, King Francis I of France, who was remarkable for his long nose, cutting wit, and preoccupation with tennis, ordered a black velvet suit trimmed with nearly fifteen thousand gold buttons for a meeting in Calais with his political and sartorial rival Henry VIII of England, who showed up similarly adorned with pearls and gems. A century later, Louis XIV spent $600,000 on buttons in
one year—and a total of some $5 million during his reign. One of his coats was covered with fifteen hundred karats’ worth of diamond buttons and diamond-trimmed buttonholes. People who saw him wearing the frock said that he sagged under the weight of it.

Buttons marched down front openings, across sleeves, around pockets, and along the back vents of men’s coats—and if that wasn’t enough, tailors would slash openings in garments for the sole purpose of creating more divides that could be bridged by buttons. In the mid and late 1700s, button mania peaked. The Comte d’Artois, who would later become King Charles X, used diamond-encrusted clocks as buttons. Other style-setters sported buttons featuring erotic etchings, insects under glass, or woven human hair. Some buttons were as big as sand dollars, others as tiny as lead shot. The most hopelessly obsessed changed their buttons several times a day. Some people found it to be too much to handle. An eighteenth-century English aristocrat’s suicide note read simply, “All this buttoning and unbuttoning.”

Buttons were just one manifestation of a change that was sweeping Europe. Before the eighteenth century, clothing denoted social class. None but the upper crust wore lustrous silks, ermine collars, and gold trims: it was easy to tell who was who. But the end of the feudal system meant that fashion no longer instantly conferred status. To make matters more confusing, faux jewels began to appear. Now almost anyone could get their hands on objects that only looked expensive. Paste stood in for diamonds, foil for silver, and gilt for gold.

It was a new social order “based not on birthright but on wealth, which was announced by extravagant display,” according to Diana Epstein and Millicent Safro, the co-authors of
Buttons
and the co-founders of Tender Buttons, a New York City button boutique in a tiny Sixty-second Street brownstone that is considered
one of the world’s greatest troves. Paste and gilt “belonged to a world that admired surface over substance.”

Eventually, men’s fashions shifted away from the extravagant to the sedate. Color was out; earth tones were in. Horn buttons, with their subtle color variations and natural beauty, became the buttons of choice among tastemakers and custom tailors.