I find the story about buttons on sleeves being used to prevent soldiers using their sleeves as kleenex to be preposterous.
First off, the buttons on sleeves are on the outer forearm. If one were attempting to wipe his face with his sleeve, the surface most likely to be in contact is the inner forearm.
Second, there are other parts of the sleeve without buttons that are perfectly adequate for wiping - shoulder, elbow crook, etc. In fact, those are the current suggested locations for covering your mouth for a sneeze. Or one could use the coattail. So putting buttons on the outer forearm sleeve seems like a poor way to prevent said usage.
Now for a real reason, consider that shirt sleeves also have buttons on them, typically on the outer forearm. If coats at one time were more likely to have actual cuffs that could be opened and then buttoned closed, then that would be a much more likely reason. Even better, before buttons, sleeves used cufflinks. Those tend to be gaudy affairs.
The reason why suit coats now have buttons on the sleeves even though the sleeves themselves don’t open is the same reason we have lapels that can’t be used to close the coat, and some coats have pocket flaps but no pocket underneath. Form over function, carryover in appearance.
That’s for sure. Indeed, the whole male dress-up uniform of white shirt, silk tie, and a coat, even in warm weather makes no sense in modern life. Regardless of the designer, a man’s suit fits within a very narrow specification. Some have a hint of a functional lapel, such as a big looped buttonhole on one side, but no button on the other.
Rather than debating how we got to this absurd uniform, perhaps we should discuss how to cut the worsted wool moorings, and wear something else.
By the way, about those pocket flaps with no pockets… Often, there’s a pocket in there. It’s lightly sewn shut to help the fabric drape well while the suit is being built and altered to fit the customer. Check before you snip.:smack:
Reading for comprehension, we see that Unca Cece said that the story relates the buttons were on the TOP of the sleeve (you know, the part likely to wipe your nose with), and later migrated to their current position.
Not that I disagree with your assertion about the probability of the story being correct, mind you. I don’t think Unca Cece thought it very likely either.
Men’s coat sleeve cuffs used to be huge, and were folded up and buttoned to keep them in place. The cuff could be unbuttoned and folded down to cover the hands in cold weather. This picture of a style from the early 1700s shows the large size of the cuffs, although it’s at a bad angle and the buttons don’t show up very well. This picture from the American Revolution period is clearer, although the cuffs have started to shrink in size, and will be largely ornamental by the early 1800s. As the cuffs become ornamental rather than practical, the buttons were retained as decorative elements. Note also that the buttons were originally horizontally around the sleeve, following the top edge of the folded-up cuff. They later returned to a practical use when tighter-cut sleeve fashions necessitated a slit cuff to allow the hand through, with the buttons now vertical on the side of the cuff at the slit. When fashions returned to a slightly looser cut the buttons reverted to a decorative function.
A lot of military dress uniforms retain elements of the earlier styles, often including the horizontal row of cuff buttons (and the fancy embroidery around them that started out as reinforcements to keep the buttonholes from ripping out of the cheap cloth supplied for soldiers’ uniforms).
I get the joke that the German word for “solution” is not “zolution”, but this just hides the fact that Frederick the Great spoke French, in which case the word would be “solution.” Ever heard of the Pour Le Merit?
Sleeve buttons that don’t undo still come with the typical “buttonhole” stitching around them as if they are supposed to undo. And suits made by tailors still do undo. Those vestigial buttonhole stitches must be there for a reason.
My guess FWIW is that it has something to do with what I will call for want of a better desciption “layer inversion”. There is a trend over time for the inner layers of clothes to become more displayed - to be outer layers. The most recent manifestation of this is the boys who show off the Calvin Klein underpants band, and the women who wear their bra very visibly. Once these items were purely functional, never to be seen, and so were made without any aesthetic effort. With increasing wealth, more effort goes into aesthetics, leading to a desire to display the conspicuous consumption that goes with owning them.
An example from 50 years ago is the transformation of the men’s white T-shirt from undergarment that one would never be seen in to respectable everyday clothing. Note that the driver for this was not conspicuous consumption, but the reverse - an inverted snobbery, a sort of nostalgia for the working class.
Once, men never left an office building, no matter how hot it was, in “shirtsleeves”. It just wasn’t done. You pulled on the jacket. Being in shirt sleeves was more than faintly disreputable. Now, an increase in informality makes it hard to recall that. People go around in shirts and ties without jackets all the time. Layer inversion.
But suits are made of expensive fabric and hard to clean, relative to shirts. Back when it was culturally necessary to wear them even when doing something difficult or awkward, one could unbutton the sleeves of the jacket, leaving only the relatively less valuable shirtsleeves at risk.
In Casablanca, Carl the bartender does this frequently - he has his jacket sleeves rolled up so that the shirt takes the punishment.
My WAG.
In fact, don’t you see on the old fancy dress military uniforms from the 1600s and 1700s that there are cuffs, often of a different colour, and sometimes buttoned? Some seemed to be just the sleeve folded back(and buttoned?), some (later?) seem to be a separate cuff of cloth.
This is closer to another (slightly dirtier) version I once heard. When developing away from uniforms, men’s jackets became rather utilitarian with a few exceptions. They lost all the embroidery, but being able to unbutton your sleeves was retained by certain professions because it was practical. The most pre-eminent faction here is said to have been the veterinarians, because of the sometimes medically urgent requirement of having to reach into the inside of a cow or horse from behind… where rolling up your sleeves saves the garment from becoming covered with s***.
However, I have no idea whether this is really true. Today, having real and not bogus buttons is the sign of a tailored jacket. And in general, the buttons prevent the lower part of the sleeve from becoming threadbare from friction on tables, desks, etc.
With reference to military uniforms, note that the uniform originally followed civilian fashions rather than the other way around, differing mainly in having a common colour and added touches such as shoulder straps and insignia. It’s only in the last 150 years or so that military uniforms have diverged significantly from civilian fashions, generally by retaining elements (especially in full dress uniforms) for much longer after they have been dropped from the civilian styles, and more recently by the the development of utilitarian styles for combat wear. (Look closely at an Army/Air Force/Navy officer next time you see one in the military equivalent of office wear - other than the colour and insignia, ribbons, and stuff, the styles could have been seen on any street in the 1910s or 1920s.)
So why did military uniform coats have big cuffs adorned with buttons? Not to keep a soldier from wiping his nose, but because everybody’s coat originally had big cuffs and buttons.
As for the utilitarian function of working buttons on modern suit coats allowing the sleeves to be rolled up for dirty jobs, I expect that, like me, 99% of other men would be smart enough to just take their suit coat off and roll up their shirt sleeves before starting the job.
If I recall my snippets of military history - the “uniform”, or everyone dressing exactly the same, was an offshoot (sorry) of musket combat. Those muzzle-loaders were horribly inaccurate, so the only effective combat was to line up a huge row or two and fire a volley, hoping to hit a decent number of the other side. The bright uniforms were so that you could tell one side from the other trhough the huge clouds of smoke that old gunpowder gave off.
The scale of industry needed to support a musket army meant that the nation states - France, Spain, Austria-Hungary, England, Prussia - slowly overwhelmed the smaller less resourced states like the small Italian and German ones. When your infantryman carried a huge chunk of quality mechanical metal into battle, and needed a complicated chemical industry to supply huis ammo, the additional cost of a few yards of cloth was less important.
Before that, war was nowhere near the scale and cost it became - a lord provided his own clothes, and wore a flag or badge to signify who he was. Peasant conscripts came dressed as they were. Clothing and footwear were expensive, and nobody provided you with a free set or two.
As for 'take it off"? We forget in these days of central heating, that it was a lot easier to get cold and a lot harder to get warm back then. Every piece of firewood had to be cut by hand. A working country vet wouldn’t just strip to the shirt or worse, outdoors on a brisk day. It might be a while before he could make it to somewhere that had a decent fire going. And hot baths had to be made, kettle by kettle. Easier to roll up the sleeve, and then wash the damned thing next month when it was warmer and also time for the quarterly bath.
In addition to the same explanation Bookkeeper gave, I’ve heard that the reason that buttons and specifically multiple pairs of buttons are sewn on the edges of blazers and suit jackets is, and has been for some time, for the purpose of giving the owner of the jacket back up buttons, in case some of the ones already attached to the front of his jacket fall off. Since all the suit jackets I’ve ever seen have had rather distinctive buttons, this seemed a natural explanation to me.
Please take a suit jacket, hold the sleeve and the front close and compare button size. Sleeve buttons might be smaller. However, the idea is nice, I will try it as soon as a front button falls off and gets lost.
And thanks to md2000, that’s exactly the point. Having to undress to your shirt in winter was most likely not a nice proposition.
I had a long and wide-ranging talk with a prof once when I was considering taking a “history of technolgy” course. he mentioned a whole range of things - they didn’t use catapults on Greek or Roman ships because (a) you’re firing off the ballast- how many shots can you get off before you tip over and without much accuracy, most would be wasted and (b) every shot would strain the ship - unless fired straight along the keel, the twisting effect of the catapult’s kick would eventually cause all the hull planking to separate and leak.
the other interesting thing I remember was a discussion of the civil war and shoe sizes. the US civil war was a war on a scale never seen before. The need for everything was so huge it boosted industry in the first “modern” war. Just clothing a million men in uniforms created the first standard clothing sizes. Before that everything was hand-tailored to the individual.
Army shoes (boots) came in standard size, so rudimentary they were flat soles with no left or right boot, thus giving rise to the famous legends about marching, painful army boots and flat feet. Apparently when the shoemakers tried to sell these to civilians, they quickly discovered consumers wanted comfort and a proper shaped fit.
I’d question whether this was all that new. After all, the French alone in the Napoleonic Wars had over 3 million men under arms, and the major European powers had already been there and done this - the US just wasn’t affected at the time, being involved only in the small scale sideshow of the War of 1812. The main difference with the US Civil War was probably that the ongoing improvements in technology meant the actual manufacturing process was significantly more mechanized.
Simplest answer is usually the correct one, no? As some have mentioned, the purpose of the buttons is so that one can simply roll their sleeves up. These sleeve buttons have become largely vestigial in a world of manufactured suit wear. If you are dashing enough to have working buttons then the proper term is “Surgeon Cuffs”, presumably because an old world surgeon wouldn’t want their work trimmings to get soiled by your innards.
Oddly enough, the shirt buttons in a similar locale are called “Gauntlet Buttons”.
