The Button Guild
In the middle ages and Renaissance, buttons were regulated by a guild. The Buttonmakers' Guild controlled who could make them, what materials were acceptable, and how they could be sold. Whether made by the guild or at home, buttons were made by hand. If you want a sense of what that means, look up the Dorset button — a hand-wound, stitched thing that took real skill and real time.
That made buttons expensive. And, THAT made them a status symbol.
If you had a lot of buttons on your clothing, people knew you had money. The number of buttons, their materials, their placement — all of it signaled where you stood. Sumptuary laws in some places actually regulated who was allowed to wear certain kinds of buttons. The guild existed not just to control quality, but to control access. Scarcity was the point.
What Happened When Buttons Got Cheap
The Industrial Revolution started changing this at the end of the 1700s. Some kinds of buttons could be manufactured — stamped metal, molded materials. But, the real boom didn't hit until the Victorian era, when manufacturing scaled up enough to make buttons genuinely cheap and widely available.
Suddenly, everyone could have buttons. Lots of them. On everything.
The clothing industry was changing at the same time, but not uniformly. To this day, all clothing is still sewn by human hands, even when using machines. The sewing machine didn't eliminate the person doing the sewing — it changed what they could do and how fast they could do it. But, the button itself went from a hand-crafted status marker to an industrial commodity.
What happens when a status symbol gets cheap? The people who built their status on it don't just accept the new reality. They adapt their signaling. Victorian fashion went through a period of almost absurd decorative excess — not because manufactured buttons were better, but because if everyone could have buttons, then the new signal had to be something else. More elaborate fabrics. More complex construction. More layers. The goalposts moved.
The Window
At inflection points like this, there's a window where the old values get hacked by what suddenly just got cheap. The hack works in both directions.
Some people load up on the newly cheap thing and use it to perform the status it used to represent. Victorian boots with rows of twenty buttons up the side weren't functional — they were cheap buttons deployed in volume to imitate what a few expensive buttons used to signal.
Other people retreat further into the handmade, the scarce, the difficult. They define their identity by the things that can't be manufactured yet. "Real" buttons are handmade. "Real" clothing is bespoke. The further manufacturing reaches, the further the line of authenticity gets pushed back.
Both responses are about status, not about buttons.
The Adjustment
It eventually adjusts. It always does. New indicators emerge. People figure out that twenty manufactured buttons aren't the same signal as three hand-carved bone buttons, and both of those aren't the same signal as the quiet confidence of someone wearing whatever works without thinking about the buttons at all.
The adjustment period is uncomfortable, though. Especially for the people who spent years learning to make buttons by hand, who built their livelihood and their identity on that skill. Their skill didn't become less real. The buttons they make aren't less beautiful. But, the economic and social structures that made their skill the only path to buttons — those did change. And, the reaction to that change is rarely about buttons.
I'm not going to draw the line for you to whatever current moment you're thinking about right now. You already drew it.
The button guild is gone. People still make buttons by hand. Both of those things are true at the same time, and neither one canceled the other out.