CityPages Kuwait June 2016 Issue June 2016 | Page 47

to-left, like Napoleon. But, is this a cause or a consequence? Perhaps we
should look a little further back.
The right-button orientation might perhaps be a holdover from warfare,
in particular, the construction of armor. ‘To insure that an enemy's
lance point would not slip between the plates,’ curators write in The Art
of Chivalry: European Arms and Armor from the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, ‘they overlapped from left to right, since it was standard fighting
practice that the left side, protected by the shield, was turned toward
the enemy’. Thus, men's jackets button left to right even to the present
day.
Riding horses was, of course, the transport method of choice for all of
us, men and women, for centuries, even millennia. Early depictions
from Greek vases show women with both legs on the same side of a
horse, but it should be pointed out that they were almost always shown
with a man leading the animal, thus the lady had no real control over the
animal’s movements. The men were in charge. Masculine supremacism
has been in existence for a very long time, it would seem, and one can
hardly fail to recognize the similarity here between certain countries,
not so very far away, which have to invent all manner of fairy tales to
explain why women are not allowed to drive. So, if the ladies must ride
horses, gentlemen, we should devise a method for them to do so in a
dignified manner. Sidesaddle was developed in the Middle Ages as a
way for women in skirts to ride, as some rather quaintly put it ‘in a
modest fashion’ and modern horse shows often have a ‘sidesaddle class’
not only for dressage and other ladylike events, but for jumping and
eventing as well. Traditionally, ladies rode sidesaddle with both their
legs to the left of the horse’s head, so putting shirt buttons on the left
would supposedly reduce the breeze flowing into women's tops while
riding; an argument which lacks conviction, since it takes no account
of left-handed ladies.
Upper -class women didn't dress themselves. They had servants to do
it for them. Most of us will have at least heard of the phenomenally
successful British series ‘Downton Abbey’, where the upper classes
would no more think of dressing themselves than changing a wheel or
milking a cow. They had squadrons of maids, footmen and butlers to
attend to their every need and to rise to the status of a lady’s maid or a
gentleman’s valet was a senior and respected position in the household.
All that fastening, tying and buttoning can be tricky, especially when
dressing another person. Wealthy women with maids to help dress

them had buttons on the left to make it easier for a right-handed maid
to fasten them. So, there we are. A simple and conveniently watertight
argument. Unless, of course, your maid happens to be left handed.
And, what about male valets? Surely they weren’t all left-handed?
Additionally, buttons were comparatively rare on women's clothing
until the 18th century and only until after 1860 started appearing
always on the left for women - at least a century after maids or servants
started being used for such tasks. Like most historical explanations for
obscure outcomes, however, there does seem to be something of a flaw
in the reasoning. Why would upper-class people adjust clothing for the
sake of the servants?
The clothes of the rich and famous are often the recipients of media
attention and no sooner has a particular celebrity been photographed
in public wearing a particular item, social media floods us with a tidal
wave of outlets where one can buy copies of the garment at a fraction of
the cost. As an example, when Prince George, the two-year-old son of
the Duke of Cambridge, met the Obamas recently, there was a flurry of
Internet activity trying to buy a copy of his white, fluffy dressing gown.
People, it seems, have always wanted to mimic the clothing of the rich,
since in so doing some of the cachet and glamour associated with their
lifestyles somehow rubs off on the rest of us with less money in the
bank. Buttons and buttonholes were costly additions to a garment. They
stayed on the left so the masses could copy wealthy women's clothing.
Stretching our credulity even further, we can return briefly to Napoleonic
supremacism. Women supposedly mocked the French emperor not just
because he was short and fat but because of his hand-in-waistcoat pose
which was then co nsidered a mark of dignity. Apparently, he ordered
that women's shirts be manufactured to button on the opposite side
of men's so they could no longer jeer at him. This one's not totally
believable and sources are unreliable, but the information persistently
surfaces in gender equality seminars, so you must judge for yourselves.
Havelock Ellis was a doctor and a co-founder of the Fabian Society.
At the turn of the nineteenth century it was a commonly held belief
that women's garments buttoning right to left was a mark that women
‘seem inferior to men in strength and in rapidity and precision of
movement.’ He himself briefly argued that women have weaker motor
skills because they ‘require assistance’ in dressing. Before all the female
readers hurl this magazine across the room, he was, surprisingly for his
time, a pioneer of female liberation and his subsequent writing was so
far ahead of its time in terms of gender equality that his readership was
limited to the extreme avant-garde and his publisher was once arrested
for having sold ‘a certain lewd, wicked, bawdy, scandalous and obscene
libel in the form of a book’. The Victorians were not quite ready for
him, it seemed. It took a Kinsey a generation later to add scientific
validity to many of his ideas.
A parallel theory asserts that, as women's clothing started expressing
emancipation and borrowing more and more from men's clothing,
manufacturers maintained buttons on the left as a way to distinguish
between men's and women's garments. This apparently innocuous
practicality, however, has inequality at its heart as Kim Johnson, a
professor at the University of Minnesota's College of Design, recently
wrote ‘As long as we have power differences between the genders, we
will continue to have dress differences.’ Thankfully, the implied sexism
of having left-sided buttons has become meaningless in the mindless
minute it takes to put on a shirt in present day. While unisex tops from
a variety of brands all maintain buttons on the right, the men's way
traditionally, this will eventually end up being a thing of the past with
the movement of high fashion toward more gender-neutral clothes.
Indeed, some retailers are climbing on board, abandoning male and
female-divided clothes shopping which marks a major step in catering
to what we must now call non-binary shoppers.
Or, you know, we'll just deal with it, as I did when buying from the
barrow man in the market.
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