Look closely at a good jacket and you will find that its buttons are keeping several different kinds of company. The ones down the front do exactly what they promise, they fasten the coat. The little row at the end of each sleeve looks as though it might, and on the finest jackets it actually does. And then there is the bottom button of the front, which asks to be fastened and must, quietly and firmly, be refused. To understand a suit is partly to understand which of its buttons mean it. Here is the short history, and the rules that fall out of it.
The buttons that actually work
The buttons at the cuff are the ones with the best story. Today most men treat them as decoration, four little discs stitched to the end of the sleeve, and on a factory suit that is precisely what they are, sewn shut over a cuff that does not open. But they began as working buttons on a working garment. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a gentleman's coat sleeve genuinely unbuttoned at the wrist, so the cuff could be turned back to keep it clean, to wash, or to do close work with the hands. The tailoring trade came to call a true, functioning cuff a surgeon's cuff, after the old idea that a physician could unfasten his sleeves and roll them back to operate without taking off his coat.
They owe their place on the sleeve to Napoleon. He ordered buttons sewn onto the cuffs of his soldiers' coats to stop them wiping their noses and mouths on their sleeves in the cold, and the row of buttons at the wrist has been with us ever since. It is the perfect illustration of the point: cuff buttons exist because sleeves once opened, and the buttons were there to close them again. When ready-made suits arrived and the cuff was sewn permanently shut, the buttons stayed on out of tradition, now purely ornamental.
Which is why, to this day, working cuffs are a small badge of the real thing. A jacket whose sleeve buttons actually unfasten is almost always bespoke or made-to-measure, or at least a serious piece of ready-to-wear, because building a functioning buttonhole into a cuff is fiddly and it makes the sleeve far harder to shorten later. Some men who own such jackets like to leave the last cuff button undone, a deliberate, barely visible signal that the buttonholes are genuine and the coat was made for them. It is the quietest flex in menswear, and the sort of detail this journal exists to notice.
The bottom button, and the king who couldn't reach it
Now to the front of the jacket, and the rule that trips up more men than any other. On a standard single-breasted suit you fasten the top button, or the middle one, but you never, ever fasten the button at the bottom. The reason is Edward VII, the great Edwardian arbiter of dress, who as Prince of Wales and then king set the style of an age. Edward grew famously stout, and over that considerable frame he left the bottom button of his waistcoat and his coat undone. Out of deference, the court and then society left theirs undone too, and what began as one large king's habit hardened into a rule that has outlasted him by more than a century.
The convention took so completely that the modern jacket is now cut on the assumption that you will obey it. The bottom button and its hole are placed for balance and tradition, not for use. Fasten them and you fight the very shape the tailor built.
The bottom button is not a button you forgot to do up. It is a button you are meant to leave alone.
Why the cut demands it
The reason is drape. A jacket is shaped to close at a single point, its waist button, and to fall open below that in a clean, relaxed line over the hips. Do up the bottom button as well and you clamp the coat shut where it was meant to breathe. The fabric pulls into ugly diagonal creases radiating from the button, the skirt of the jacket flares out like a bell, and the whole silhouette turns boxy and strained. Leave it open and the jacket does what it was designed to do: it frames the body, holds a soft line, and lets you move and sit without the coat pulling against you. The rule is not fussiness for its own sake. It is simply how the garment works.
The rules, plainly
Strip away the history and it comes down to a handful of habits worth making automatic. On a two-button jacket, fasten the top button and leave the bottom one open, always. On a three-button jacket, remember the old tailor's phrase, sometimes, always, never: the top button sometimes, the middle button always, the bottom button never. On a one-button jacket, or a dinner jacket, do it up when you stand and it is the only decision you have to make. And whatever the count, unbutton the jacket whenever you sit down, so the coat and the seat of your trousers are not at war, then fasten it again as you rise. Buttoning as you stand and unbuttoning as you sit should become as unconscious as breathing.
The one honourable exception is the double-breasted jacket, which lives by opposite law. A double-breasted is built to be kept closed, its inner and outer buttons anchoring the two overlapping fronts, and it looks unmoored hanging open. Keep it fastened while standing, and if it wears the classic six buttons with two to fasten, do up the top working button and, by the same old logic, feel free to leave the very bottom one undone. Even here, the lowest button tends to get the pass.
Dress for yourself, not the room. But if the room knows one rule of tailoring, it is this one, so leave the bottom button be.
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