Button
Unknown Artist
ca. 1780
Medium
mother-of-pearl
Classification
Button
Culture
French
Department
Costume Institute
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
From the Hanna S. Kohn Collection, 1951
Accession Number
50.231.180–.186
Tags
About this artwork
This elegant mother-of-pearl button exemplifies the refined luxury goods that adorned fashionable European dress during the late eighteenth century. Created circa 1780, when France led European fashion and decorative arts, this diminutive object represents extraordinary labor and skill. Contemporary sources calculated that each pearl button would pass through fifty pairs of hands during manufacture, with individual workers handling up to one thousand buttons daily in specialized workshops. The u...