Count Your Buttons Day

What the day is

Count Your Buttons Day is observed on October 21. The instruction is to count your buttons. There is no further purpose, and the day is honest about that.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented, and no founder or sponsoring organization is reliably known.

The button, on the other hand, has a longer history than it deserves. Decorative buttons are ancient, appearing in the Indus Valley thousands of years ago, but the button as a fastener required a second invention: the buttonhole, which reached Europe around the thirteenth century. Before that, clothing was pinned, tied, belted or simply pulled over the head.

The buttonhole changed tailoring. Garments could now be fitted closely to the body and opened without being untied, which made the tailored, shaped clothing of late medieval Europe possible. Buttons proliferated so quickly afterward that several cities passed sumptuary laws restricting how many a person of a given rank could wear.

The convention that men's buttons sit on the right and women's on the left is genuinely unexplained. The most repeated theory is that wealthy women were dressed by servants facing them, and that men needed to draw a sword with the right hand across a coat that closed the other way. Both are plausible and neither is documented. The convention persists in the clothing industry regardless, which is a reasonable demonstration of how standards outlive their reasons.

How to take part

• Count them. It takes under a minute and the number is usually higher than expected once coats and cuffs are included.
• Check which side yours are on, and notice the convention holding across your whole wardrobe.
• Sew a loose one back on before it disappears. This is the day's one practical application.
• Keep the spare buttons that come with garments somewhere you could actually find them.
• Look at an old coat in a museum collection and count the buttonholes. Hand-worked ones are remarkable.