Explaining suit button fashion historyfrom @fineasjackson

Transcript

This better? Don't fasten it. These buttons can't open. Nobody questions it. Nobody knows why. This is episode 55 of Chasing Beauty and today tier looking at the suit jacket. Look at the bottom button. On a two button jacket, you never fasten it. Ask anyone and they'll tell you it's the rule. But it's not a rule. It's an accident. It all started with tum tum. Well, King Edward the seventh. Nicknamed tum tum due to his forty eight inch worst. This was a guy who took a roast chicken to bed every night in case he got hungry. At some point around 1900, Edward could no longer button the bottom button of his jacket. No, he stopped trying and then the court had a problem. You can't out yes a king. So one by one, everyone around him started leaving their bottom buttons open too. Within a generation, it spread beyond the court. Taylor started cutting the suit pattern assuming that button would never close. The entire silhouette was redesigned around a gap that only existed because the king ate 12 course dinners. No, look at the cuff. Three or four buttons on the sleeve. On most jackets, they're decorative. Stitched flat with no button holes behind them. They don't do anything. But they used to. And the reason they existed is one of the strangest class stories in the history of clothing. For centuries, surgeons weren't considered professionals. They were grouped with barbers. Men who cut hair, pulled teeth rank occasionally sawed off a limb. Tradesmen. Lower class. It took generations for surgeons to claw their way into respectability. And by the nineteenth century, the thing that finally separated a trained surgeon from a butcher with a bone saw was the coat. A dark wool frock coat worn at all times. Taking it off and working in your shirt sleeves would drop you right back into the category that you spent centuries trying to escape. The coats were rank, unwashed, and caked with blood and pus from previous operations. A coat stiff with blood wasn't a sign of failure. It was a badge. Proof that you were in demand. But the coat had a problem. You can't operate properly with heavy wool sleeves in the way. And you can't just shove a frock coat sleeve up your arm. It's too stiff. Too rigid. It falls right back down. So the surgeons went to their tailors. And their tailors happened to be next good. Savile Row, before it became the most famous tailoring street in the world, was a street full of surgeons. The tailors cut real buttonholes into the cuff no the sleeves could be unbuttoned and folded back. So now, no need to remove the coat. Unbutton, good, and operate. Two hundred years later, the coats are good. But the buttons are still on your sleeve. And on a bespoke jacket, a good one, they still open. No, two rules. One from a king who couldn't close his coat and one from a surgeon who couldn't take his off.