"If I were allowed to choose...

...from the pile of books which will be published one hundred years after my death, do you know which one I would take?  I would simply take a fashion magazine so that I could see how women dress one century after my departure.  And these rags would tell me more about the humanity of the future than all the philosophers, novelists, prophets and scholars."

So said Anatole France, a French novelist who died in 1924 at the age of 80.  The women's clothes he saw in his day ranged from Civil War era hoop skirts to enormous leg-o-mutton sleeves to the liberation from corsets to the high peak of flapper frivolity in his last years.  Imagine that variety over a lifetime, and he a man of letters who paid attention to such things.

And nearly a hundred years have indeed passed since his death.  Imagine the developments since then.  Just a few years after his passing, fashion dictated swimsuits that show all a woman has, and ladies in hard-tailored suits as severe as men's... Would he think us too feminine and yet too masculine?

Then there's the reprise of the Victorian era in the 1950s, the Gibson Girl in the 1970s, the re-created flapper during the 60s, and so on... Are our closets today a split personality of sorts?  Too many acceptable looks run awry of the dictum of fashion?

Look at the mainstream fashion of vintage clothing today... Would he think us unabashedly nostalgic?

I wonder what he would think about our humanity.  What would you guess?

Why Are Men's Buttons Opposite Women's Buttons In Clothing?

It's an age-old question! From our fashion history background, the default answer was always this:

Men dressed themselves, and conventionally they buttoned their clothes left-over-right, meaning the buttonhole side of the fabric lapped over from the wearer's left. But women had servants to help them dress, and because the servant was facing the wearer, they needed an opposite closure to match their opposite perspective.

Claudette Colbert dressing herself quite easily in Clark Gable's pajamas, circa 1934.

This doesn't quite hold up when you realize men had butlers, but maybe those man-servants never attended a gentleman in his dressing quarters. Also, when I use my own hands to button or unbutton a garment as a servant would (whether the item is men's or ladies'), I don't feel a preference either way. But maybe that's just me. And this custom doesn't account for left-handedness, but in the days of its origin, I doubt many people were accounting for that.

Also, consider the fact that, at various points in history, women wearing obvious closures of any kind were considered to have looser morals, because that line of buttons showed just how to gain access to what was underneath. Why make it easier to undo a blushing beauty's buttons by placing them in a convenient way for her paramour, especially in times puritanical?

I checked through my references here at Vintage Vixen for any notes about buttons, but I couldn't find any. I have several books on male & female differences in fashion, but they omit this fundamental difference, which I thought was interesting. It also seems to indicate that this was a custom created out of a functional need, not a sexual differentiation.

So I looked around online. There are many ideas about this historical conundrum, and in addition to the theory above, here they are in summary:

• Men needed their coats to close with opening toward the wearer's right, because they pulled their sword from their left hip. If the coat opened to the left, the butt of the sword could get caught in this opening.
• Women tended to carry a child on their left hip, and they nursed by opening & closing their blouses with their right hand, so they needed an opening to match.
• People's clothing was once so similar in style (not sure which era they're describing here) that the differences in buttons was the primary indicator of gender.
  
• The difference was due to some religious or moral reason, possibly to hide/show more skin depending on the viewer's perspective.
• Buttons in the back of a ladies' garment were easier to do/undo by oneself as well as a servant if placed a certain way.
  

The ideas keep coming. Like the chicken and the egg, no one really knows which came first. Or why.

Personally I'm still wondering - do you have a preference if you're buttoning up someone else's shirt? Or do you think the servant answer is simply a reason given to placate the curious?

References:
Photo: The Language of Clothes | Yahoo | Life's Little Mysteries | Fun Trivia | Snopes