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 Tender Buttons, housed in a 12.6-foot-wide (3.8-meter)
brownstone on Manhattan's Upper East Side, is stuffed to the
ceiling with a cornucopia of clothing fasteners. For decades, it
has been providing relief to anyone who has lost an unusual
button and needs to replace it.
"Each button has its charm, its quality, its aesthetic," said
Millicent Safro, who opened the store in the 1960s with her
friend Diane Epstein as an artistic jaunt inspired by New York's
burgeoning pop art scene. Safro runs the shop, named after a
book of poems by Gertrude Stein, following Epstein's death in
1998.
Decades later, the shop is stuffed to the rafters with buttons,
some dating back to the 17th century, organized in multiple
floors of Safro's slender townhouse.
"A woman bought a dress in Rome and lost a button on the
airplane. And we had the button. It was a very proud moment,
Safro said.
She steadfastly maintains the store's tradition of sharing the
often rich history of each button with the customer in pursuit
of it.
"When you came to buy a humble shirt button, you got the entire
history of that button," Safro said.
That includes the metal and faceted glass buttons from 1890 that
sell for $225 each and that collectors describe now as
"Victorian jewels" but once called the less-politically correct
"Gay 90s," Safro said.
"It was a time when the railroads were being built and everyone
was prospering," she said, explaining why the enormous, showy
knobs emerged as status symbols just before the turn of the
century.
In the 1890s, such a button may have secured a cape. In the
1980s, they were snapped up for couture wear by Chanel's newest
creative director, a rising designer named Karl Lagerfeld, who
died last month, she said.
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The fashion visionary who dressed former first lady Nancy Reagan,
the late James Galanos, also was a customer. As was Harvard
University professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who sat down for a cold
beer with then-President Barack Obama in the Rose Garden of the
White House in 2009.
When Kermit the Frog needed to secure his raincoat for an appearance
on the U.S. children's television show "Sesame Street," the Muppets'
clothing designer turned to Tender Buttons for help.
Much of the store's inventory is contemporary. But it also includes
antiques such as early American buttons made of copper, tin and
brass and engraved with "Long Live the President - GW" to
commemorate George Washington's inauguration as the nation's first
president. The buttons sell for up to $4,000 apiece.
Safro was unable to provide a figure for the total number of buttons
in the store. A Columbia University professor did manage to count
them, but she said she had forgotten the total.
This week, Fabio Malaver, 53, a household butler, clutched a
Mulberry suit bag and scoured the wall displays for an exact match
to replace a long-lost button. Asked if he had found what he was
looking for, he replied emphatically: "Yes, yes!"
(This story corrects spelling of surname to Malaver in final
paragraph)
(Writing by Barbara Goldberg; Editing by Dan Grebler)
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