Have you ever wondered why the buttons on women’s clothing are on the left, while those on men’s clothing are on the right?
At first, it seems like a minor detail, but one that becomes increasingly intriguing the more you think about it.
It is genuinely strange that despite all the ways that old distinctions between menswear and womenswear have disappeared, one of the few markers of gender differentiation that still exists is… button placement.
This is a vestigial reminder of former stereotypes that, for some reason, we still accept.
Granted, there are more meaningful ways to fight for equality than to focus on buttons, but this seems like a symbol that should be easy to overcome.
After all, the rationale for the difference is buried so deep in the mists of time that no one knows definitively how we got here, though there are a number of theories.
The most common is that when upper-class ladies were getting dressed in the complicated layers of Renaissance and Victorian fashion, it was easier for the maids who were dressing them, and who had to face them to do so, to secure buttons on the left (that is, the maids’ right).
Men of the same time periods mostly dressed themselves, so their buttons were on the right.
Later, women who wanted to imitate the elite imitated their button placement, as did the manufacturers who sold them on the idea.
Another conjecture has it that men’s buttons were on the right because when men went into battle back in the day, they needed to draw their swords, and swords were worn on the left.
If a man’s jacket buttoned right over left, the sword could get caught in the openings. It was safer, thus, for them to button left over right.
This is similar to the argument of those who attribute the difference in button placement to decades of women riding sidesaddle on the left and desiring the most windproof jacket situation, which turned out to mean buttoning right over left.
There are also theories that have to do with Napoleon and breastfeeding floating around, but those seem less credible. And none of them are relevant to jeans, which may be why pants developed in the unisex way they did.
None of those old notions have any relevance today.
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So why do we remain stuck with a tradition they may have created?
“I don’t know,” said Simone Bellotti, the creative director of Jil Sander, when asked why he thought the practice hadn’t changed.
“Probably people still believe in this tradition. They don’t want to change. We like our attitudes, even if they are wrong.”
After all, he said, “What I see, at least on my friends and my wife, is that they always prefer men’s stuff.”
Maybe, Bellotti said, it has to do with manufacturing.
“Probably they have those machines, and they want to preserve this.”
Not so, said Louise Trotter, the creative director of Bottega Veneta – and she would know, because when she arrived at Bottega 18 months ago, she decided to tackle the backward-looking button practice.
In her previous jobs at Joseph, Lacoste and Carven, she had swallowed her discomfort and gone with tradition, she said, but when she got to Bottega, she’d had enough.
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“A button-up shirt comes from menswear,” she said. “A tailored jacket comes from menswear. I wear menswear. Why not make it one thing for everybody?”
So she put the buttons for her button-up shirts and jackets “back into their original place” – on the right.
It wasn’t that hard, she said, to just move on from “a gender stereotype we no longer need and that is not necessary”. – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
