Covered buttons: a connection to the past

Our maiden product featured self-covered buttons, as above.

Covering buttons is a craft in and of itself, requiring specialist machinery and skill to do neatly, and it’s rare to find a production facility in this country that will do it for you.

When I was looking for people to cover our buttons in early 2020, I could only find four in the U.K. with any sort of web presence, and I pride myself on my research skills.

As of 2023, only two of these remain: someone who operates a mail order service from the west coast (and is in the process of retiring), and our guy in London, a person who looms slightly larger than life in my mind.

The idea that one could afford to maintain premises in the busiest part of London by covering buttons was slightly miraculous to me.

I was also primed into creating this mythology around our guy in London—OGIL, henceforth—by the website, where I gleaned that the workshop had been running since before the wars, when the West End was a garment manufacturing hub serving the costumiers of theatreland and the tailors of Savile Row.

The business and machinery were passed down from great aunt to parents to OGIL himself, who started covering buttons aged 12 for extra pocket money.

The workshop is tucked away at the end of a mews, just off one of the most frenetic streets in central London.

There’s always something magical about leaving the froyo parlors and bachelorette parties behind as you walk down a darkened passage in search of an open door. At the bottom of a curved staircase is the workspace, filled with a jumble of trims and an assortment of hand-operated machinery. The radio is often on, playing something like The Yardbirds.

I don’t actually know how long it’s been there.

In my mind, the business once occupied a street-facing storefront, back when rents were reasonable and most businesses in this part of London were family-run. I imagine it was sandwiched between record shops and other haberdashers until skyrocketing rents forced it and other independent businesses into the recesses, holding on for dear life until the next rate review.

Each visit conjures a mixture of admiration and awe.

My professional skills primarily involve moving pixels on a screen. As such, I valorize the physicality of craft. I also value specialization, and the process of doing something over and over again, over a lifetime, until you become expert at that one thing, a concept explored in the film Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2013), for example.

There is also something Dickensian about the workshop and OGIL. In this era of machine-automated production, it feels like a bygone idea to do anything by hand. Holding an OGIL-covered button in my palm, I feel a connection to a faraway time, not through matter but through process.

But the sentiment that best describes how I feel is mono no aware.

British garment manufacturing is sunsetting. The owner of my sample room put it best while lamenting how hard it is to find an engineer to repair her Reece machine, “That’s our industry—everyone is dying or moving to Spain.”

The future is uncertain, and who knows if there’s a succession plan in place. Maybe he’ll retire. Maybe a rediscovery of the art of buttonmaking will lead to a proliferation of buttoners in central London.

But for the moment, there is only one: OGIL.

Change is as inevitable as the passing seasons. In its impermanence, the present is exquisite, and for the moment, I’ll relish the experience of taking fabrics downtown to be made into buttons, of turning off busy streets and disappearing into passages seemingly overlooked by time.