CityPages Kuwait June 2016 Issue June 2016 | Page 46

BUTTONS
John MacArthur
John MacArthur was born in
England, but has Celtic ancestry,
so loves to sing. Abandoning his
choral training, he sings songs
of love and loss, owning several
antique acoustic guitars. He has
degrees in physics, chemistry and
mathematics, has studied theology
and business management, so,
in fine nomadic tradition, he can
call several universities home.
After seven years in Kuwait, he
'retired' and laughs at himself every
morning, commuting between his
Paris island home and country
house in rural France where he lives
with his wife, a food writer and
stylist, and, perhaps soon, a dog,
should he be allowed one. Much to
her dismay, he is thinking of taking
up the mandolin. He has written
for various publications worldwide
on whatever happens to catch his
imagination.

46

JUNE, 2016

Something strange happened the
other day. Where I live there’s
a large outdoor market and
amongst all the ticketed jewellery
and cheap handbags, there’s a
little guy with a big smile and a
barrow load of clothes labelled
‘Grandes Marques’. Basically,
it means that the designer stuff
that’s left over from sales and
outlets and has exhausted all other
sales opportunities, ends up in his barrow. Put another
way, a brand label shirt costing €215 can be bought for
€12.50. Or, in my case, a Ralph Lauren cardigan for
€20. But, when I got it home, I noticed that the buttons
were on the ‘wrong’ side. Left for ladies, right for gents.
To my horror, I found myself thinking ‘it’s for a (rather
large) girl!’ St op sniggering, because it isn’t. It’s cut
and tailored exactly as I might have expected had it
been bought from a hanger in the quietly elegant male
environment where it once resided and with a much
weightier price tag. So, what’s with this about buttons?
Every day, millions of people are walking around with

these little reminders of gender inequality emblazoned
on their chests. There are different theories as to why
the discrepancy exists in the first place, but all of
them come down to this: The Button Differential is
a relic of an old tradition that we have ported, rather
unthinkingly, into the contemporary world and it is
only very recently that this little bulwark of gender
fascism is being seriously challenged.
Let’s start with men’s shirts: buttons on the right
placket, the open flap on the left. Why should this be
so? There are, it seems, quite a number of supposed
reasons, some shrouded in historical myth and others
absurdly fanciful. A common explanation arose from
the fact that clothing, for wealthy men, often included
weaponry. Since most men held swords in their right
hands, it was more convenient and apparently quicker
to use their left hand for unbuttoning, thus reducing
the time taken to defend themselves, or their female
companion, against footpads and robbers. There is
considerable evidence in portraiture lending weight
to the theory. All those hand-in-waistcoat pictures
popular in the 19th century? They involve, generally,
the slipping of hand into an open area of the coat, right-