Buttons

 We take buttons for granted.  They fasten our shirts, our coats, our waistbands.  They're now most commonly made of plastic, but they can also be made of metal or bone or wood or shell.  The image below shows buttons made of shell on a sweater.  

 Buttons can also be a fashion statement; the buttons on a suit jacket sleeve really have no practical purpose, and a double-breasted jacket has lots of buttons that don't do anything.

 For much of the Middle Ages, clothes were not fastened with buttons.  Whereas the modern standard for buttoned openings is to overlap two pieces of cloth, with the lower level having a button that goes through a buttonhole on the upper one, medieval clothing typically butted two pieces of cloth together, side by side  They were held together by stitches, by toggles, or by a clasp.

Interestingly, early medieval people did have buttons, or things that look like buttons, little knobs sewn onto clothes as decorative features, the way today we might put souvenir pins on a hat or campaign "buttons" on a jacket.  Some buttons were even jeweled. They just weren't used to fasten the clothes together. 

The basic item of clothing then for both men and women was a tunic, basically a long T-shirt.  It would have to be loose enough to wiggle one's way into without zippers or buttons or any sort of opening, though fancy women's dresses were cut on the bias, giving the fabric enough stretch that it could be cut closer to the body.  Fancy tight sleeves would have to be stitched on once someone pulled on their sleeveless tunic; at night the stitches would be cut and the sleeves removed.  One sleeveless tunic could be paired with several sets of sleeves for different looks.

This changed in the thirteenth century. It's not clear if other parts of the hemisphere (which too had long had decorative buttons) had earlier invented closing openings with buttons paired with loops or buttonholes, or if Europeans invented the idea. But at any rate this use of buttons reached Europe. The aristocracy loved them.

A tight fitting jacket or vest (known as a doublet) could be cut to follow your upper body's shape without worrying about how you'd wiggle into something so tight.  Instead, it was open down the front until buttoned right up with a couple dozen buttons. Funerary carvings of the deceased often showed them with all their buttons.

The military of the post-medieval period adopted buttons with a vengeance, lots of brass buttons, both for buttoning and for show.  As a result, when the Amish appeared in the seventeenth century, with one their central tenets non-violence, they rejected the use of buttons as too associated with the military.

As I have discussed previously, the modern Amish are not living in some version of the Middle Ages, but like medieval people before the thirteenth century they do not use buttons. Small children may, but adults use hooks and eyes (Velcro counts as hooks and eyes) and pins.  It is apparently quite a move toward adulthood when an Amish girl can graduate to the use of all straight pins, rather than buttons, to hold her outfit together.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on clothing and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback!