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Unique collection guaranteed to ‘push your buttons’

Posted on | March 2, 2011 | 2,540 views | 7 Comments

By Adam King

A button is more than simply a necessary accessory that, when paired with a buttonhole, has kept shirts, dresses and pants securely in place for centuries.

It can actually be a telling portrait of the styles of the time from whence it came.

Gayle Strege has more of these portraits than she knows what to do with.

Ann Rudolph, the wife of former OSU botany professor Emmanuel Rudolph, had spent a lifetime collecting buttons — thousands of them — and donated them to Ohio State’s Historic Costume and Textiles Collection in Campbell Hall upon her death in 1991.

But they remained there in unsorted obscurity when Strege arrived as curator of the collection in 1996. She had neither the manpower nor the expertise to figure out everything that had been bequeathed.

But with the help of doctoral student Harriet McBride, who was attending OSU on a fellowship supported by Rudolph, the oldest and rarest of the buttons were sorted out and stored in their own drawers.

Masterpieces miniaturized

With only a cursory glance through these signature buttons, it’s easy to see why button collectors get started. Hardly just fasteners, the Rudolph collection features true works of art on a miniature scale.

The late 19th-century Satsuma (Japan) buttons are some of the rarest in the collection, with hand-painted depictions of Mt. Fuji, flowers and Geisha figures on a ceramic surface. Their use wasn’t intended for Japanese clothing, as kimonos never use buttons; more likely they were sold to tourists or exported.

There are ornate Victorian buttons — Strege’s favorites, which are larger than most of the others — with huge amethyst jewels, cut glass or other paste jewels.

“I haven’t found a lot of instances where they were actually on garments, but perhaps they were clasps on a cape or cloak,” Strege said. “From an aesthetic point of view, they really grab your attention.”

That’s the exact opposite purpose of the earliest buttons in the collection, known as China buttons. Used in the mid-18th century, these buttons feature a print or calico stamp that blended with the fabric in children’s dresses or women’s calico dresses.

“So the idea was not to notice them,” Strege said. “There are a lot of buttons in this collection produced by studio artists that were never intended to go on clothes, so that’s a whole other side to this collection. Then there are some quite aesthetically beautiful ones that were used as a type of jewelry or ornament on clothes, so they have a dual purpose.”

Taking stock

When McBride graduated and the other 12,000 items in the Historic Costume and Textiles Collection drew Strege away, the button collection once again was set aside.

But a very persistent Marilyn Regrut, president at the time of the Buckeye State Button Society — of which Rudolph had been an active member — followed up with Strege in 2006 and ’07 to see what was being done to put the collection in order. She and others were excited to see the extent of what Rudolph collected as a whole.

“I asked her if she couldn’t get a couple of volunteers together to help us out because these were the people who really had the expertise,” Strege said. “If we could do that, I thought we could eventually get it photographed, get it catalogued and get it on our database and make it accessible to use it as a reference tool.”

Strege enlisted McBride, who had retired by then, to supervise Regrut and five volunteers to sort through the remainder of the collection. Four years later, Regrut and McBride are still at it.

To date, all the buttons have been catalogued on cards and placed in 40 banker’s boxes. The only thing left to do is fill in information about each button — materials, details and dates — in the database.

Though it seems like the button journey has been never-ending, the Rudolph collection adds another bit of excellence to the Historic Costume and Textiles Collection, which in addition to men’s, women’s and children’s clothing also features a huge accessory repository of hats, shoes, clutches and the like representing a 250-year span.

“One of the great things about collections like this is we kind of straddle the world of art and history,” Strege said. “We have beautiful, designer pieces that are works of art, and then we have some of the other pieces that are the documents of everyday history.

“When you have these collections at a place like Ohio State that is an educational institution with so many different kinds of courses, we can work with people in history, art history, art education and cultural studies and interact with them on different levels. It’s a great resource for the students to have.”

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