When was the last time you admired someone's style from afar, say from across the street? Or when you found yourself sitting next to them in a public place, a cafe perhaps, at a fashion show or on the bus? Did you strike up a conversation? Because we mostly don't. Mostly we just think how fab they look and that's that.
Consider our first Episode for series 11 an encouragement to talk to stylish strangers, in the very best of ways, because you never know what might come out of it.
At London Fashion Week last season, I spotted Beau McCall in the crowd, and thought: Oh my, what a FABULOUS OUTFIT. He was covered, you see, in buttons galore, like a Harlem version of a Pearly King. He'd topped off this look with a Vivienne Westwood Buffalo hat. Next thing I knew, he’d sat down next to me. The rest is, if not exactly history, encapsulated in this warm and sparkling conversation. Actually, there is quite a bit of history in it - from the evolution of the button as a fastener/decoration strictly for the well-to-do, to everyman's (and woman's) closure of choice, to the fashion history of NYC in the late '80s.
Also up for discussion: why your family should have a button box, the joy of hand-sewing, how fashion can help if you're shy at parties, and what happens when you try and sew hundreds of a buttons onto a bathtub...
Beau McCall photographed by Rohit Venkatraman
ABOUT BEAU
Beau McCall (aka Sir Buttons aka Count Buttons, aka The Button Man) creates wearable and visual artworks using clothing buttons. His work addresses themes such as racism, LGBTQ+ rights, as well as pop culture. He's used buttons to embellish a 450-pound cast iron bathtub, a dining table, a school chair, created a lifesize Kool-Aid man, and a plethora of wearable art from jackets to caftans to durags.
Beau grew up in Philadelphia in public housing. “His mom was a housewife and hung prints of Picasso and Modigliani’s works on their walls, and his father worked at a pencil company, bringing home custom monogrammed pencils with his and his brother’s names on the side for school.
I guess back then, as children, we didn’t know we were poor,’ McCall remembered. ‘We lived on a small budget. My mom sees things in the trash, and she was big on thrift shopping and upcycling.’
What she couldn’t or wouldn’t buy, McCall created for himself. But for McCall, his mother’s most significant collection was held in the Maxwell House coffee tin.” From The Afterlives of Buttons and the Visionary Fashion of Beau McCall by Emma Cieslik. Read the rest in Folklife magazine here.
In 2024, a major retrospective of his work opened in the US. Beau McCall: Buttons On! is at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts until February 2, 2025.
Yes, he even covered a full-size bath in buttons, each one hand sewn. Listen to the interview to find out how he did it!
““I take the button out of the everyday and present it to you in an artistic form, whether I’m doing collages, whether I’m doing a button-covered bathtub.” ”
Souleo wears Beau McCall bolero.
NOTES
WANT TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT OUR ONLINE COURSE? Discover here.
Listen to LIZ RICKETTS from The Or Foundation on Episode 150. Donate to the Kantamanto fundraiser here.
How lovely was the listener’s letter from Nike Hatzi? As mentioned, she’s a natural dyer in British Columbia, Canada. Her label SHIFTY MOTHER is fab. Follow her in Instagram here.
THRIFTING used to be about necessity and economy. Today it’s undoubtedly been gentrified. ARE THE RICH RUINING IT? “Thrift shopping was once primarily known as an affordable way for lower-income people to find secondhand clothing, but in recent years, it has become popular among the wealthy, leading to rising prices. What are the ethical questions behind this practice, and how has it changed thrift stores for people in need?” Read the rest on The Week.
Souleo models Durag by Beau McCall.
BUTTONS
You know, round things (although, some of them are other shapes, obvs). These days we often take them for granted, but buttons have a long HISTORY of utility, decoration and status.
A button is a “usually disk-like piece of solid material having holes or a shank through which it is sewed to one side of an article of clothing and used to fasten or close the garment by passing through a loop or hole in the other side. Purely decorative, non-utilitarian buttons are also frequently used on clothing.” (Brittanica)
According to Ian McNeil in An Encyclopedia of the History of Technology, "The button was originally used more as an ornament than as a fastening, the earliest known being found at Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley. It is made of a curved shell and is about 5000 years old."
In ANCIENT ROME, decorative buttons were used them to fix clothing in place with pins.
Jacket circa 1100 - 1300 “This fragment was once the right front of a jacket, belonging to a child. It was found in a tomb at El A'zam, near Asyut, in Upper Egypt. The garment is made of silk cloth woven in colours on a red ground with vertical stripes, and lined with undyed plain woven cotton cloth. The neckline and front edge is bound with plain woven blue silk and seven blue knotted textile buttons have survived down the front.” (V&A)
According to Encyclopaedia Brittanica, “In medieval Europe, garments were laced together or fastened with brooches or clasps and points, until buttonholes were invented in the 13th century. Then buttons became so prominent that in some places sumptuary laws were passed putting limits on their use.
This hollow, silver-gilt button comes from Salamanca, in Spain. Men in that region wore a large variety of buttons, both flat and hollow, as was common throughout Spain, but the pattern on this one, of a star made from a mass of tiny applied granules and rings of twisted wire, is unique to Salamanca, and to the village of La Alberca in particular. Originally, it would probably have been worn to fasten the collar of a man's shirt, linked to a matching pair by an oval loop. It was bought, with two others, for eight shillings at the International Exhibition, London, 1872. (Vicotria & Albert Museum)
By the 14th Century buttons were worn as ornaments and fastenings from the elbow to the wrist and from the neckline to the waist. The wearing of gold, silver and ivory buttons was an indication of wealth and rank. Expensive buttons were also made of copper and its alloys. The metalsmith frequently embellished such buttons with insets of ivory, tortoiseshell and jewels. More commonly, buttons were made of bone or wood. Button forms of these materials were also used as foundations for fabric-covered buttons. Thread buttons were made by wrapping the thread over a wire ring
In the 18th Century luxury metals and ivory largely replaced fabric, although embroidered buttons in designs to complement particular garments were popular.” For centuries, buttons were for the rich.
Embellished jean shorts by Beau MCall.
PLASTIC changed everything. New materials such as celluloid, the first plastic, were used as early as the 1870s. Plastic made buttons very affordable - and abundant. According to this article, The majority are produced in China, with 60% of global production focussed on one town, Qiaotau, with the carbon impact of the needed nylon production alone capable of surpassing half a million tonnes of CO2-eq every year. Whoa!
1930s button card in the V&A collection.
Here’s ISAAC MIZRAHI’S TED talk:
BLOOMINGDALES is an iconic department store on Lexington Avenue. “It's where Sean Combs got his start in fashion, Sarah Jessica Parker bought her Calvins and André Leon Talley rode the escalator with Givenchy.” Read the rest on NYT
The Plasmatics
THE PLASMATICS (above) were a NY punk band founded by Rod Swenson and fronted by blonde bombshell Wendy Orlean Williams. They soon became the hottest ticket in Manhattan, reaching a level of notoriety no other CBGB band could match. Fuelled by outrageous onstage theatrics, their shows became instant sell-outs, and the buzz soon spread. The original idea was to offer an alternative to the decadent goings-on uptown: “We started out as an anti-disco movement,” Swenson told Louder Sound. More here.
HARLEM INSTITUTE OF FASHION was founded in 1966 by Lois K Alexander Lane. As her daughter tells it: “In the 1960s, after being told by a New York University professor that Blacks had not made any contributions to the fashion world, she set out to dispel the myth that Blacks were new found talent in the fashion industry. She received her Master’s Degree from New York University. Her thesis title was "The Role of the Negro in Retailing in New York City from 1863 to the Present" (1963).
Mom established two custom wear boutiques - one in Washington, DC (The Needle Nook) and one in New York City (Lois K. Alexander & Co.). In 1966, she founded the Harlem Institute of Fashion, an educational institute that offered free courses to students interested in dressmaking, millinery and tailoring.”
Read about how their fashion shows helped to catalyse the BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL movement in the 70s here.
Here’s an interesting article about how the Black Fashion Museum originated at the Harlem Institute of Fashion’s Benefit Show in the late ‘70s.
AIDS BURNED THROUGH A GENERATION OF CREATIVE TALENT. “I thought both Angelo and Michael were friends that I would grow old with. As it turned out, I didn’t even have a chance to say good-bye.” One by one, people are dying—quietly—of AIDS. The deaths are most visible in fashion and the arts. [Journalist] Michael Shnayerson reports on the awful decimation of talent.” Read his devastating Vanity Fair piece.
REWIND, MEMORIES ON REPEAT is Beau’s tribute to his lost friends. Discover here.
THANK YOU FOR LISTENING. Please do get in touch if you like the show, and help us continue to make it by growing our audience. Sharing it on social media, or just with your friends, rating, reviewing or simply recommending it, makes a huge difference.
Find Clare on Instagram @mrspress