We wear suit jackets and shirts without thinking about it. Have you ever wondered why men’s and women’s jackets and shirts have different layering styles and button and buttonhole positions? In this issue, we would like to introduce a slightly surprising reason.
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The dominant hand and its origin in the customs of medieval European nobility!
Buttons were originally created as ornaments in ancient Greece. Initially, there was no mechanism to fasten them with buttonholes, and for more than 2,000 years since then, they have been attached to every part of clothing as a complete ornament. In medieval European court dress, it was common to find ” more than 30 buttons on the front alone. It is said that it was in the 13th to 14th century European court clothing that the button-hole hooking technique was invented, just like in today’s clothing.
Clothes with buttons were very expensive at that time because of the time-consuming sewing process, and only upper-class people who frequented the court could wear them. As was the custom of the upper classes in Europe at that time, men changed their clothes by themselves, but women usually did not change their clothes by themselves but had their servants do it.
The buttons and buttonholes were placed so that men could easily change by themselves and women could easily be changed by servants. (Right-handed and left-handed people may not have been aware of this, but it is actually quite difficult to hold the buttonhole with the dominant hand and press the button with the non-dominant hand.)
Even in the custom-made clothing culture of that time, the overwhelming majority of people were right-handed, so specifications that were convenient for right-handed people became common.
The same logic can be applied to the “men can easily take off women’s clothes…” This is a theory that could be used as a pick-up line to make it easier for men to take off women’s clothes. It might be a good idea to keep this theory in mind!
