Discs of connection: Basic buttons link past to present through the haze of memory

A shirt from Wax London includes a row of off-white buttons that casts opinion editor Clay Wirestone's mind into the past. (Photo by Clay Wirestone/Kansas Reflector)

More of my life used to revolve around buttons than it does today. I seem to remember those plastic brown swirl buttons coming loose, dangling by a thread, needing to be stitched back on my collar or cuff.

To a child, buttons seem mysterious. They attach pieces of your clothing to one another, and they don’t always cooperate with tiny fingers. I suspect that we all have primordial memories of fumbling with buttons on a shirt or a coat or a pair of pants. I can cast my mind back and almost feel my fingers stubbing against one another as they try to ease a button up through the buttonhole.

I’m not sure if the rise of fast fashion, easy-to-replace clothing sold at low prices, has affected our relationship with buttons. I suspect it has. We prefer sweatpants with elastic waistbands and cavernous shirts we can pull over our heads and jam our arms through. Bing, bang, boom. Dressed.

Many don’t tie shoes anymore. Pairs of footwear come with pretied laces or no laces at all. Sometimes they use the same kind of elastic as the waistbands of those sweatbands.

I remember my mother’s red sliding button box. It was made of metal, painted a vivid cardinal that browned over the years. The top would slide back, and inside you sorted through a cornucopia of ceramic and glass and stone and who knows what else buttons. Some were tiny, with a couple of infinitesimal holes, while others were large flat discs.

The buttons, dozens of them, shaded from white to gray to brown to black and back to off-white again. Here and there you might glimpse a vivid red or blue or green.

At one point, my mother taught me how to sew buttons back on shirts. You would thread the needle — a dangerous and painstaking task on its own — and then pull the thread through the shirt and then the tiny hole in the button. You would draw the thread through until the needle was free. Then you would turn the needle 180° to go back through the second hole in the button. You would repeat this process until you had gone round three or four times, then tie off the thread on the inside of the garment.

I wonder if parents today teach their children how to sew buttons back on their shirts. My son learned to sew after a fashion, but just because we had an ample supply of thread and fabric. He assembled makeshift clothing just because he could.

I myself never caught that sewing bug, but I understood why it might be necessary to repair a shirt. I understood that you weren’t just going to replace it when everything else worked perfectly well. I remember my father’s half dozen white dress shirts, made from a thin white fabric. Sections would fray until they finally graduated to the work shirt part of the closet.

Buttons don’t preoccupy me anymore, with one exception. My husband gave me a gorgeous woven shirt from Wax London for my birthday this year, a shirt covered with textures and patterns, yet staid enough to wear from Kansas Reflector events. It includes a column of mid-sized, off-white plastic buttons down the front.

I love that shirt. When I button it from top to bottom, connecting one side to the other, I remember the younger me and my mother and the world of the past we all yearn for but can never regain.

Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.