The Coat Route (20 page)

Qiaotou’s ascension to button supremacy began, as the story goes, in 1980 when two brothers found some discarded buttons in the street and set up a stand to sell them. Spurred by the brothers’ success, other families began selling, and then manufacturing, buttons.

“
Buttons turned out to be a growth industry in the nineteen-eighties, in part because many Chinese entered the decade with just a couple of Mao tunics to their name and ended it with a wardrobe full of shirts,” Nicholas Kristof wrote in a 1993
New York Times
report on China’s button boom.

Button making—and then zipper making—exploded in Qiaotou, thanks to the backing of European apparel makers who were eager to cut costs and a population willing to work for peanuts and overlook the grim environmental fallout of plastics manufacturing. By 2005, the town, known as Button City, had some seven hundred factories and owned the international fastener market. Even Grove thought about moving some of its production offshore.

“We looked at going to China,” Peter admits. “But that was a no, because they take all your technology and throw you out. Then we thought we might build a factory in India, but in actual fact we couldn’t produce much cheaper than what we do here, because the costs of starting a business there were colossal. Not just the cost of putting up the factory. It’s all the bloody bribes. We were talking to one chap near a piece of ground in Bangalore, and he said if we go through the proper channels it would take two years. But, he said, ‘I know the man—if you bribe him, it will take four weeks.’ Even now, some of the materials we buy in India, we have to bribe people. With all the red tape to get licenses, you have to cross somebody’s palm with a bit of money.”

The mass production of cheap buttons makes Peter Grove queasy.

“Anyone can make millions of buttons with no character,” he says.

I look down at the flimsy plastic buttons on my cardigan and feel a little guilty for never having given my buttons credit for even having the potential for character—or, really, ever having given them any thought at all.

T
here is a population of people, it turns out, who think a great deal about buttons—more, in fact, than might be deemed entirely
healthy. These people are competitive button collectors, most of whom are members of either the U.S.-based National Button Society or the U.K.’s British Button Society. Their thousands of members spend most of their time buying, trading, selling, and researching buttons. Several times a year, they gather at conventions to enter their button collections in contests. Their entries are displayed on what are known as trays—nine-by-twelve-inch display cards on which collections have been painstakingly curated by color or material or theme in accordance with the button societies’ strict classification rules. Some collectors get obsessed with a certain design—birds, for instance—and spend years, or even decades, on the hunt for avian fasteners to complete a set or create a compelling tray presentation.

“
The set was the scorecard,” Steven Gelber wrote in
Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America
. “Collectors had to impose some pattern on their acquisition so they could know not only what they had but also what they did not have. Creating an arbitrary series so that one could then fill it is, no doubt, odd behavior in the eyes of those who do not share the hobby but it is how the game is played.”

Button collecting is not new. The earliest button collectors were young women, who, just after the Civil War, began making “charm strings” that they believed would bring them luck in love. No string could have two of the same buttons, a requirement that led, according to an 1898 account in
The American Archaeologist
, to a rash of button thefts: “
It was not uncommon while that craze lasted for garments to be entirely stripped of their buttons by pestiferous collectors.”

The fad—and the pilfering—faded away for a time, but button collecting resurfaced in 1938, when a New Jersey housewife named Gertrude Patterson appeared on a popular radio show to
talk about her button collection.
The show, called
Hobby Lobby
, was hosted by Dave Elman, a vaudeville performer and hypnotist, who conceived of the broadcast as a way “to tell the troubled world how to dispel gloom by making better use of its free time.”

Gertrude Patterson’s appearance sent radio listeners across the country racing up to their attics in search of their grandmother’s button jars. In January 1939,
Hobbies
magazine announced the formation of the National Button Society, and later that year,
Ladies’ Home Journal
ran an article encouraging women to take up button collecting in order to “
become more charming and beautiful.”

Men were urged to embrace the hobby as well.
The Complete Button Book
, written in 1949 by Lillian Smith Albert and Kathryn Kent, reminded reluctant would-be male collectors that buttons could be manly: “
Nearly two thirds of buttons made before 1820 were made for the use of that once proud peacock, the male of the species. Kidd, the pirate, wore buttons of silver and gold.”

Men did get interested, but only when button collecting became commodified.

“
The absurdity of collecting inherently low-value products disappeared when collecting became a process that turned garbage into gold,” according to Gelber.

There was, and still is, some money to be made. Nineteenth-century compressed horn buttons featuring the Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind can go for about $100 each. Vintage French enamels sell for hundreds of dollars; buttons from the uniforms of Confederate soldiers sell for thousands. And in 2000, a rare lacy glass button in the shape of an ear of corn sold for $12,000. Most collectors, however, are drawn to buttons not for their cash value but for their implied backstory—for the way they offer a small but powerful connection to the past. As Martha Stewart, who knows
a thing or two about collections, said, “
Buttons are the fossils of the sartorial world.”

Charles de Gaulle collected buttons from French army uniforms. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis went for rare French enamels. Buttons from the eighteenth century captivated Baroness Edmond de Rothschild. Margaret Woodbury Strong, an heir to the Eastman Kodak fortune, bought them by the bushelful.

Some people fall into collecting buttons when they inherit a stash from an elderly relative—sometimes just a mayonnaise jar full of buttons, sometimes a much more elaborately curated collection. Jocelyn Howells, a past president of the National Button Society and one of the button world’s queen bees, started with a collection that had been carefully classified and mounted by her grandmother. She now has a million and a half buttons, the value of which—well, she would rather not say.

“Anyone who knows anything about buttons today will know, with that many buttons, it would add up to a lot,” Jocelyn said when I spoke to her by telephone. She seemed like a rational and pleasant person, though she did get a little worked up as she told me a story about an acquaintance who tried to wangle one of her prized buttons away from her in a questionable deal. Her tale hints at the darker path collectors sometimes find themselves walking down.

The most predatory button collectors carry small scissors to nip buttons off garments left unattended or hanging on racks. Felicidad Noriega, the wife of Manuel Noriega, was arrested in 1991 for cutting twenty-seven buttons off apparel at a Burdines department store in Miami. (She agreed to a plea bargain, paid restitution, and performed a hundred hours of community service.) At a Macy’s store, salesclerks in the designer-apparel department were puzzled by clothes that had been stripped of their
buttons. Security personnel stepped up their surveillance and eventually identified the perp—she was a sweet-faced, gray-haired woman in a wheelchair, who could be seen on surveillance tape rolling from rack to rack, scissors in hand.

Chanel’s double “C” logo buttons are particularly tempting targets.
Simon Doonan, creative director for Barneys, recalled hearing a story about a woman who took a Chanel suit into a fitting room, cut off the buttons, and inserted them into her vagina. Security personnel recovered the loot by handing her a bowl and waiting outside the fitting room. Freida Warther spent eighty-three years amassing the seventy-three thousand buttons that covered the walls and ceiling of her house in intricate patterns, now open to the public at the Warther Museum in Dover, Ohio. A die-hard collector to the end, she had, it was discovered, been cutting off the buttons of her nurse’s London Fog raincoat from her nursing-home bed.

Most collectors do not go to such extremes, but they are serious about their buttons. They attend conventions armed with magnifying glasses used to scrutinize and identify possible purchases. They know that a button made of bone will show tiny black specks where the blood traveled through; ivory will show crosshatch lines. Horn buttons can be identified by pick marks—the small holes were gouged into the backs of the buttons when they were plucked out of the mold.

Collectors also use needles, heated with lighters or matches, to identify materials. Burning the button produces certain signature odors. According to the National Button Society, jet smells like coal gas; Lucite like nail-polisher remover; tortoiseshell like stagnant salt water; and vegetable ivory like burning walnut shells. Horn smells of cooking meat or burning feathers.

It’s more than curiosity that drives collectors to accurately
identify what a button is made of. Celluloid, the world’s first semi-synthetic plastic, was used as a stand-in for ivory, tortoiseshell, jade, and marble until it became widely known that it was highly flammable.
An 1892 issue of
Chemist
+
Druggist
recounted a case in which a woman was burned when she was standing by a fireplace and her buttons ignited. (Motion-picture film was made of celluloid until a series of fatal theater fires caused by the combustion of film made it obvious that a different material needed to be used.) For collectors, celluloid poses another problem: the material has a tendency to self-destruct if closed up in airtight containers, committing what is known in button circles as celluloid suicide.

Other materials caught on for a while, and then faded away. In the early 1900s, one in every five buttons produced in the United States was made of tagua, a golf-ball-size nut that grows on palm trees on the northwestern coast of South America. The nuts, which arrived as ballast on ships, were cheaper than ceramic or metal and were hard and white as ivory once they were dried. Tagua buttons were used extensively on World War I uniforms. This seemed a fine idea until troops discovered that trench rats had a taste for the nuts and gnawed them off their pants. A movement toward natural sustainable products spurred renewed interest in tagua fasteners. In the late 1980s Patagonia, the outdoor-apparel maker, replaced plastic buttons with rain-forest tagua-nut buttons, but was swamped with returns when customers discovered that the nuts disintegrated in the washing machine.

Pearl buttons, made from the iridescent lining of fresh- and salt-water shells, were popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and for several decades Muscatine, Iowa, which harvested mussel shells from the Missouri River, thrived as the “Pearl Button Capitol
of the World.” By the 1960s, however, the industry was all but dead—and so was Muscatine.

At about the same time, the horn-button industry and the town of Halesowen went into precipitous decline. The trains stopped running. The brick rail station that stood at the foot of Mucklow Hill, with its potted flowers and ivy-covered façade, was torn down. And the majestic hundred-foot-high viaduct that spanned Dowery Dell was demolished.

I
ask Peter if he could show me Halesowen.

“Nothing to see, really. It’s a bit of a ghost town now.”

I tell him I would still like to see it, so we go out to his car and drive through the factory gates. We pass the Waggon & Horses, a corner pub with sloping floors and church-pew benches, where not much has changed since the 1800s—except for the fact that, a few years back, it started charging for the gherkins that had always come free with the turkey-and-ham pie.

“Spit and sawdust,” Peter says. “You don’t want to go in there.”

Ahead, I can see the spiky tower of the St. John the Baptist Church. Built of dark mottled sandstone cut from local quarries, the nine-hundred-year-old Norman church has nearly always been the thing to look for in finding your way home from the hamlets around Halesowen—from Cakemore and Lutley and Warley Wigorn, and beyond. We park nearby and walk to the churchyard. There is a large cemetery behind an iron fence where dry brown leaves have eddied around the old mossy gravestones. James Grove and seventy-five other members of the extended Grove family are buried here. Inside the church, one of the tall
stained-glass windows is dedicated to James Grove, hinting at the stature of the family and the near-sanctity of the button in this town.

“You don’t want to go in, do you?” Peter says.

We walk a few blocks to the center of town, where there is a new bus station, a modern-looking silver-and-royal-blue structure that looks out of place. Beyond the station is an ASDA, the Walmart-owned U.K. superstore, and the entrance to the Cornbow covered shopping center. The downtown mall is the legacy of a 1950s decision by town officials to raze Halesowen’s commercial heart and start over. That the mayor at the time, Peter William Scott, was a demolition contractor and the councilmen were all builders are facts that have not been lost on critics who mourn the flattening of the town’s historic core.

“It used to be a lovely old high street, filled with family businesses,” Peter says.

There was Sidney Shacklock’s haberdashery, W. S. Welch’s drapery shop, Wrensons grocery, W. Hollies butcher shop. The buildings were replaced with boxy structures capped with cement overhangs that seem designed to block any rogue ray of sun that might have escaped through the Midlands cloud clover. In 1968, the main shopping streets were pedestrianized and the area was christened “the Precinct,” a name that cleverly presaged the need to step up police presence in the long, dark tunnel that led to the shops and became a favorite hangout of drug dealers and teenage thugs. In the eighties, a roof was constructed over the strip to create an indoor mall.