Today is the start of National Button Week, so let’s consider the Perfect Propriety of a gentleman’s buttons.
Shirt buttons: Traditionalists will insist that a gentleman doesn’t wear a button-down collar with a suit and tie. That attitude is softening (or weakening, depending on your viewpoint), which Etiquetteer wrote about in Volume 17. But when a gentleman is not wearing a tie, how many buttons may he leave unbuttoned with Perfect Propriety: one, two, or more? Etiquetteer came of age in the Swinging 1970s, and so considers up to two undone buttons Perfectly Proper. The 1970s image of the Swinger open to the navel and dripping with gold chains and medallions has become such a comic stereotype that it should only be attempted at costume parties. If a man is going to go about with more than two shirt buttons undone, all Etiquetteer can say is, he needs to do so with Complete Confidence and a compelling décolletage.
Vest buttons: Is the bottom button of a gentleman’s vest really supposed to remain unbuttoned? Miss Manners* used to tell us that it depended on which prince had your loyalty: Prince Albert, or his son who became Edward VII, who left it unbuttoned to irritate his father. At Black Lapel, the current thinking is that a buttoned bottom button “makes you look like a rube.” Amy Vanderbilt noted that “The bottom button of the vest is nearly always left unbuttoned.” [Emphasis Etiquetteer’s.]
Trouser buttons: Until the proliferation of the zipper** just before World War II, the most important buttons in a gentleman’s clothes were on his trousers. It was a faux pas of the most ferocious order if a gentleman was not impeccably, completely buttoned in public. This led to a variety of coded messages for one gentleman to communicate discreetly to another that all was not as it should be. After the zipper came along, the most standard of these became “XYZ” for “Examine your zipper.” That’s still appropriate even for Button Fly Mishaps.
Jacket buttons: Mercy, there seems to be little agreement on this. Let’s start with double-breasted jackets. Amy Vanderbilt’s position, “It must be kept buttoned when a man is on his feet,” is Etiquetteer’s. That means completely buttoned. Esquire Etiquette of 1953 stated “And remember that you only button the top outside button of a double-breasted jacket . . . “ but Etiquetteer cannot agree. More than other jackets, a double-breasted jacket emphasizes a gentleman’s figure. A flapping jacket detracts from this. Besides, a completely buttoned double-breasted is such an effective reminder of Good Posture.
There, that’s better.
Esquire Etiquette continues “. . . only the middle button of a single-breasted jacket,” and here Etiquetteer agrees. On the other hand, Etiquetteer remembers breezing through childhood churchgoing Sundays never ever buttoning a jacket button, “But when I became a man I put away childish things.”
Lapel buttons: The same rule applies as with lapel pins: never wear more than one at a time in a suit jacket lapel. If you have more than one candidate, view, or slogan to espouse, pin all of them onto your favorite denim jacket and go to town. Or on your rainbow suspenders and start taking orders at your local watering hole.
Etiquetteer wishes you a Perfectly Buttoned-Up First Day of Spring.
*In her Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior.
**Apparently in 1937 Esquire magazine held a “Battle of the Fly” contest in which the zipper emerged victorious over buttons. Etiquetteer is dying to find a copy of this issue.