How women liberated their legs — and then their lives
Forget burning bras – it was the invention of tights that truly set women free
BTHE BUTTON BOX
by Lynn Knight
ACK in the Sixties when I was a child, I had an indulgent grandmother with a nifty pair of knitting needles. She made exquisite jumpers for me and little dresses for my dolls, and while her needles clicked away, my great treat was to go through her button jar, whose contents seemed like a treasure trove.
Sometimes I’d ask my grandma where a button came from and I discovered that every one had a story.
The writer, Lynn Knight, is my exact contemporary, and while I was going through my grandma’s button jar, she was equally captivated by the collection of her own grandma, Annie.
She had been a professional dressmaker and kept a marvellous hoard of buttons in a Quality Street tin.
Lynn would use the buttons as coins in the game of shops she played with her stylish great-aunt, Eva.
But as she grew up, they began to acquire a new significance. Vintage style was all the rage, so the delicate discs of crystal and mother- of-pearl gained a new lease of life in Lynn’s teenage wardrobe, embellishing Bibainspired dresses copied from the fashion pages of 19 and Honey magazine.
The novelist Virginia Woolf wrote that clothes ‘change our view of the world and the world’s view of us’.
Even when the clothes are worn out, the buttons survive, with their stories of hope and happiness, tragedy and loss.
As Lynn discovered, the drama of women’s lives from the 19th to the mid20th century was hidden in plain sight among the brightly coloured buttons that rattled so enticingly in her grandmother’s Quality Street tin.
SHE begins her history with a 19th- century jet button. On Prince Albert’s death in 1861, his widow, Queen Victoria, put on deep mourning. An unexpected side-effect of her inconsolable grief was a tremendous fashion for all things black and gloomy.
Lynn notes that John Lewis sold 50 different kinds of mourning crepe, while‘ all dressmakers ... knew the correct scale of lamentation by trimming’.
But by the Thirties, black had begun to shed its grief-stricken connotations and represented instead the epitome of sophisticated chic.
A second near-black button, this one made of iridescent glass, fastened a blouse that Lynn’s grandmother often wore, and represents the freedom that education offered young women in the early 20th century. Annie was a bright girl, and her parents encouraged her ambition to become a teacher. But the attitude of wider society towards educating women wasn’t always as supportive.
‘Nothing bores a man so much as the pedantic woman,’ warned an article in The Lady magazine, while a 19th-century candidate for the North London Collegiate School, an academic powerhouse, successfully completed the exams, only to be flummoxed when the officiating mistress demanded: ‘ Now, dear, j ust make a buttonhole before you go.’ Annie was 21 when war was declared in 1914. She was given a Singer sewing machine as a birthday present.
A silver thimble from around the same date represents her second career as a dressmaker.
Independent young women took on men’s work in wartime. Stylish bachelor girls were inspired by dashing heroines such as Miss Dorothy Levitt, a ‘dainty motoriste’ who, in 1902, advised fellow would-be female chauffeurs that ‘if you are going to drive alone in the highways and byways, it might be advisable to carry a small revolver’. Thirtyfour years later, the pioneering aviatrix Amy Johnson wore haute couture, in the form of Schiaparelli’s ‘ press- clippings’ blouse and blue wool suit with a divided skirt, for her recordsetting flight from Kent to Cape Town.
Most touching of the buttons i n this volume i s the tiny mother- of-pearl disc from a cream silk dress made by Annie for Lynn’s mother, Cora, when she was adopted in 1931. Cora was the first baby to be adopted in Chesterfield in England after
the Adoption of Children Act of 1926. Before the Act, buttons and scraps of embroidery were often the only memento that foundling children had of their lost mothers.
Many such tokens carry heartbreaking messages ‘ Pray Let partiuclare Care be taken’en off this Child, As it will be call’d for Again’, reads one i n the collection of London’s Foundling Museum.
Annie’s dressmaking skills meant that Cora and Lynn continued to wear handmade clothes long after most of their contemporaries had embraced the ready-to-wear revolution. For some, the relative anonymity of department stores came as a relief.
Lynn quotes a scene from one of Irish novelist Molly Keane’s novels, in which the sturdy heroine, Aroon, takes a couple of evening dresses to the local dressmaker to be let out.
‘Well, Miss Aroon,’ says the dressmaker encouragingly. ‘Wouldn’t you make a massive statue!’
Poor Aroon probably struggled with the kind of industrialstrength undergarments that are represented in Annie’s box by a suspender button — an unreliable contraption of metal and rubber, prone to breaking at inconvenient moments (in emergencies, an aspirin could be pressed into service as a temporary substitute).
The replacement of corsets by the elasticated roll-on was hailed as a triumph of liberation at the time — though a contemporary description of wriggling into the flesh-coloured elasticated horror makes it sound like an extreme sport: ‘For terrible, long, redfaced, almost tearful moments, one thought one’s thighs were clamped together for ever . . .’
Sixties designer Mary Quant was dismissive of suspenders, which, she claimed, ‘look like some sort of fearful surgical device’.
THE invention of tights meant freedom, along with the mini-skirt and no more schoolboys pinging schoolgirls’ suspenders. Though for some men, the allure of stockings and suspenders has never faded . . .
A teenage Lynn succumbed to another modern innovation — the heady charm of ready-to-wear, with a plaid smock and a pair of purple, crushed velvet flared trousers.
Lynn inherited Annie’s buttons, and now she has her own button box: a Victorian writing case inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
The only frustration of this fascinating social history is that it stops just as Lynn’s own adult life is about to start.
Women’ s lives have changed radically since Annie was a young woman and they continue to change at a bewildering pace.
So many small intimate objects that once seemed indispensable have vanished forever from our lives: hatpins, corsets, seamed nylons, rollon girdles (replaced by the equally constricting Spanx).
Buttons must once have seemed similarly doomed to extinction, made obsolete by more up-to-date technology — zip-fasteners, pressstuds, Velcro, even magnets.
Yet here they are, still captivating in their infinite variety, still holding together our clothes and our lives.