Since I posted about some of my favourite fashion queens, I’ve been alerted to a couple of outstanding omissions and discovered a couple new favourites. While not all of them are necessarily fashion-y, all of them have a keen sense of majesty and thrilling stories about how they used their power. Here they are.

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Queen Nefertiti played a symbolic role in a religious revolution. Otherwise, very little is known of her life or death. Her bust, discovered in 1912, has become an indelible modern image of feminine majesty, just as her alleged torso evokes idealized fertility.

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Eleanor of Aquitaine is remembered as an icon of courtly love, but her real life story (as I learned thanks to BBC’s She-Wolves) was much more interesting than fairy tales. As one of just a handful of fierce Medieval Queens who lived in an era where power had to be physically fought for, Eleanor’s role as a monarch was dependent on being the mother of an heir, and very precarious despite her considerable intelligence and ambition.

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Queen Nzinga of the Ndongo, like Hatshupset, avoided the question of gender by crowning herself King. With a wily way of playing her opponents off of one another, she secured her kingdom in the turbulent era of early colonialism, playing an ambiguous, notorious role in history. The most famous Nzinga anecdote has her imperiously perching on a servant’s back when no chair was offered to her.

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Empress Elisabeth of Austria is perhaps the most fashion-y queen of them all. Thanks to Lorna for properly introducing me to her! Brilliant, eccentric, and vain, “Sisi” remains forever beloved for her cult of beauty. Her hair took four hours a day to maintain, during which she would study, she had a very unusual diet and perhaps even an eating disorder, was dressed in exquisite House of Worth gowns, and when she aged she ceased allowing her image to be reproduced.

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Are there any more amazing fashion queens out there? I love discovering more!

Princesses are ubiquitous. Queens are epic. Here are a few of my favourite fashion queens.

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Pharoah Hatshepsut

Her story is a dramatic one. She is a woman who crowned herself king – and recorded her image as a man’s. Hatshepsut represents a very calculated, symbolic image-making. This is what fashion queens have in common.

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Empress Theodora

Another amazing story of transformation. Theodora remains a thoroughly charismatic enigma, a woman who used acting, style and bravado to win power and awe.

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Queen Elizabeth I

Another story of an unlikely candidate seizing and holding power. She used her clothes as literal armour of wealth, covered with pearls and jewels, and a literal halo of a ruff. At a time when both kings and queens liked to power dress, she overpowered.

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Marie Antoinette

I have to include her in every survey post I do, because she is the crux of modern femininity, or maybe a warning for what can happen when fashion takes over. Her use of image was amazing, prescient, ill-timed, and indelible. She may be dead, but her style returns to fashion over and over again.

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Empress Eugenie

The second empire restored the silhouette of Versailles with generous skirts and nipped in waists and tons of jewels. The romantic and super-feminine look was wielded with expert womanly wiles by Eugenie – another story of intrepid social climbing with style.

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Queen Alexandra

Her story is a sadder one, she doesn’t seem as much an agent of her own destiny as the others. But she is notable fashion-wise for bringing big emphasis to a collar of pearls, thus establishing the iconography for 20th century female power.

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Jacqueline Kennedy

Though not a queen, she was a modern, mortal queen – she dressed the part as if she had been born for it. In simple, spare strokes she wore the crown and the pearls with perfect modern sense.

Queen Rania

She is the most compelling modern fashion queen, an elemental beauty and aware of how she presents herself. She is a living queen who lives up to her role.

Whatever her function, it is clear that the graceful bulges of the Venus of Willendorf are an idealized exaggeration of the female form. Even though she is at least 25,000 years old, to my eyes she is an obvious fashion figure. The belly doesn’t get the glorification much any more. And yet, every so often in modern western history (and I’m sure outside of it, though I am oblivious) the belly gets to stand out.

This idealized torso, possibly of the Egyptian queen and famed beauty Nefertiti and dating to around 1350 BC, is quite slender while still featuring a pronounced belly. The Egyptian ideal is quite exaggerated. While ancient Greek representations of female forms were certainly not thin by modern standards, they were balanced proportionally, with the belly not standing out any more than any other feature.

Jan van Eyck’s 1434 masterpiece The Arnolifini Portrait features a fashionable couple, possibly celebrating their betrothal. Many modern viewers wonder if she was pregnant – all evidence points to no, and as you can see in this van Eyck depiction of Saint Catherine (on the right), the woman is just wearing contemporary fashion. The Arnolfini family were merchants, and are showing off their wealth with abundant quantities of fabric. Her gesture is possibly meant to indicate hopes for a fruitful marriage – hopes that were never realized.

The high-waisted silhouette featuring a convex belly was a long running trend for the 15th and 16th century female form – whether depicted dressed or undressed, by Botticelli in 1482 (as above) or by Cranach in 1528. These are fashionable bellies, not pregnant bellies, though it seems obvious that their fecund appearance was a significant part of their attraction. This trend very gradually, and in different ways in various geographical regions, began to evolve into the conical, geometrical torso of the Elizabethan woman.

The peascod belly (this example from 1569) is a bit more ridiculous to modern eyes – as it was to commenters at the time. The garment that clothed a man’s torso – the doublet – went through various phases over a few centuries, from more padding in the chest during medieval times, then less padding, and then more padding again. In the 16th century, the padding extended at the lower torso. The male belly became an abstract shape, described as a “peascod”. Echoed in armour, this protrusion was sometimes almost pointy.

The look was achieved with padding and was balanced out with padded sleeves, codpieces, stuffed hose and square toes - a bombastic silhouette most famously worn by Henry VIII. In this case, the look seems to be about abundance in a different form – masculine girth was probably meant to evoke solidity and strength – and later on as fashion turned, reeked of excess and machismo.

These young princes in 1637 are wearing heritage armour with distinctive peascod shaping, though by this time the style for this shape in the doublet had fallen out of favour.

Female and male waists alike remained nipped in throughout the 17th and 18th centuries until the French Revolution. A sudden resurgence in classical styles created a dramatic change in fashion and for a couple decades, women abandoned the waist. While the belly isn’t exactly the focal point of this trend, displaying a sense of relaxed roundness (these fashion plate examples are from 1806) does seem to be considered attractive.

Outstanding stomachs have been absent from modern fashion ever since. Even when styles are relatively waistless, as in the 1920s or the 1960s, the concavity of desirable bellies remains a constant. When lower torsos do appear in the spotlight, it’s only under two circumstances – here capably demonstrated by pop singer Christina Aguilera:

The turn-of-our-century trend for midriffs doesn’t quite compare to the other examples I’ve cited because the focus is on the absence rather than the presence of a belly. Still, expansive gaps between upper and lower garments do draw all the attention to the navel, and as with the other feminine examples, it is very sexual.

The trend towards displaying the pregnant belly – shocking as recent as 1991 when Demi Moore graced Vanity Fair – has now become a mundane facebook trope. Google “belly” and most of what you’ll find is garishly painted, proudly exhibited pregnant bellies. Pregnancy, which used to be something to conceal, has become something of a bulls-eye, with or without apparent irony. Does that indicate that fashion is full-circle cycling towards to fertility worship?

Sort of like square toes, bellies only seem to make sporadic appearances, and without any sort of obvious recurring pattern. It also seems like it is wholly out of our control – the hue and cry over the absurdity of the peascod belly did nothing to end its thrust. Modern campaigns meant to promote the idea of all bodies being considered beautiful – belly-ful or otherwise – are more than a bit hopeless. In history as now, bellies are only idealized under occasional circumstances.

London’s fashion schools are internationally renowned for producing some of the most talented, famous modern fashion designers. Less often mentioned are the thousands of also-grads. The tons-to-watch every year produce some of the most fascinating fashion shows, full of earnest hopes and dreams and ambitions that often overwhelm the models who have to carry so much yearning. The visual onslaught is blinding in a way – it gets very difficult to sort out the strongest visions in a sea of potential.

Most striking to me as a North American is how education styles heavily influence the favoured approach of young designers. I went to a school that focused on justifying a market strategy – this was reflected in the type of grad collections we showed. Here, the emphasis is on innovation via technique. At the RCA, for example, they have two exhibitions throughout the year – one is called “Work-in-Progress” and displays a vast array of experimental swatches and effects. When you watch the final exits on the runway at the end of the final term, each collection is a riff on the techniques each student developed.

Having seen several grad shows and variations of  “Ones to Watch”, I can’t help but notice how the emphasis on technical effect overshadows any conceptual messages or narratives, obscures the personality of the designer, and most tragically, inhibits the currency and wearability of the garments.

I’ve discussed the differences between brand-driven designers and designer-technicians before. While technically focused designers often end up being influential to other designers, they almost always fail to develop a lasting legacy and the license-able name that goes with it. People don’t wear techniques – they wear fashion, and techniques alone don’t do what fashion needs to do – confer status. Technique-driven design is fascinating to hard-core fashion nerds, but it is not a route to riches. It is ironic that so many young hopefuls come to London to go to these star-making schools and yet the instruction they receive sends them down the path of obscurity.

I’ve illustrated this post with a few examples of great designer-technicians, both historical and current. At the top is Madame Grès, the Parisian couturier whose intricately pleated, sculptural designs defied ready-to-wear and consumed vast swathes of silk jersey.

Fortuny‘s legacy is set in the pleat technique that bears his name – despite the fact that he authored other textile innovations, most notably with printed velvet.

Madeleine Vionnet was a pioneering modernist in fashion. Just as modernism in architecture is more about exploiting the possibilities of modern materials than embellishment, Vionnet’s designs drew their essential qualities from the properties of fabric. She also worked with visual artists like Erte for prints and created more conventional work, but her legacy hangs on the bias for eternity.

Vionnet’s successor to the bias crown was New York couturier Charles Kleibacker, whose technical mastery resulted in seemingly seamless construction. The simplicity of his designs are so subtly tasteful, they do not loudly proclaim the way their creator revelled in the elemental nature of cloth. His understanding of the creative process informed his role as a professor and curator in later life.

Canadian-born, London-based designer and Central Saint Martins graduate Mark Fast is the most prominent modern technique-driven designer. His designs are based on the possibilities offered by knitting machinery – and the effects are often unusual and intricate up close. Taking a longer view though, the longevity of the machine-made aesthetic is, pardon the pun, a stretch.

Fast has the potential to switch to a brand-driven career – he’s handsome and personable, he’s got a great name, yet the Spring 2012 collection seemed like he is still struggling to escape the technique trap. Explorations into other techniques like crochet are distracting from the real challenge – defining the identity of the Fast female. A collaboration with leatherwear brand Danier earlier this year was a more promising move towards establishing a non-technical Fast philosophy that resonates with the zeitgeist.

Mary Katrantzou is a Greek-born, London-based, Central Saint Martins educated designer whose bold engineered prints have caught the gaze of the eyes that matter, and as she goes into subsequent seasons under the scrutiny of the fasherati she’s dealing with the same dilemma as Fast.

I saw the Spring 2012 line by recent CSM graduate Phoebe English at Ones to Watch, and was struck at the technical singularity of the entire presentation. Every single garment was made of distressed, cartridge-pleated canvas. The question I was left with was “why?” The garments were – as English put it – clumpy. I couldn’t sort out a story or an idea, beyond the sample-swatchiness of it all. Where does a designer take such a narrowly conceived collection? What is it for? It seemed like a one-off.

A bit of research revealed a surprise for me – English’s previous collections were also technique-driven – but each with a completely different technique! Her MA collection was an attention-grabbing, visceral exploration of the possibilities of human hair. As she told i-D, she is at the mercy of her chosen materials:

There were a few different original references, but most of my influences came directly from what my samples could do and how they actually worked. Then I began thinking about how I could engineer them to work as garments. As the dresses are so frenetic I wanted to use one universal tone to unify and control the composition of the collection. The looks behave in such a wild manner in places and the black was a device to balance and unify their frantic kinetic nature.

I can’t help but be curious about what a kind of career English will build by leaping from one wildly different, materials-based process to another, from season to season. In a way she personifies the current state of fashion education in London. In a world which continues to reward personalities like Alber Elbaz and zeitgeist sensors like Pheobe Philo, the technique trap suggests that the future of fashion design isn’t being taught in school.

Christobel Balenciaga chose when to retire, saying “it’s a dog’s life”. It is a rare designer who can exit so gracefully. From history, here are five more ways to drop out as a fashion designer.

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1. Sell Out.

Halston had genuine talent, sublime taste, and a compelling personality. But his career ended prematurely, and he lived out the end of his days in gilded isolation, designer no more. How?

1. Sell your company for an outrageous amount of money.
2. Party like no party animal has ever partied before, because you can. After all, your glamourous lifestyle in no small part defines your brand.
3. Be the “consummate professional” by refusing to delegate anything.
4. Why be satisfied with mere millions of dollars? License your name until it loses its lustre. Forget you said “you’re only as good as the people you dress.”

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2. Fade Out.

Christian Lacroix is an expert colourist who revels in embellishment, celebrating the history and craft of French couture with signature verve.  Lacroix’s star never manifested in a way that matched his considerable talent. Why?

1. Start your career with a one-hit-wonder (the pouf skirt) which is a pure trend item. Little-girl inspired clothing at prices only rich old ladies can afford.
2. Nurture an over-the-top design style which appeals only to a small niche and is difficult to translate into accessories or ready-to-wear.
3. Earn the faith and support of businessmen who should know better. Launch a business which fails to profit, ever, over the course of a decade.
4. Produce your final collection on a shoestring, destined never to be delivered anywhere, and receive applause for belonging to an era of fashion which was ending just as you began your career.

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3. Fall Out.

Ossie Clark was a designer whose designs not only resonate with fashion, but were created using masterful techniques. Clark never managed, and maybe never even really tried, to translate design genius into an empire. How?

1. Be impractical, especially when it comes to money. Disregard dull matters of business.
2. Live in the present moment, fully. Hang with rock stars. Work manically. Party hedonistically.
3. Get bailed out by a high-street shop. Chafe at the restrictions of designing for mass production.
4. Be difficult. Meet your Waterloo in the form of a complex, unmanufacturable sleeve inspired by shells. Get fired.

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4. Flame Out.

John Galliano is a devourer of inspiration who produced transgressive, hyperactive runway fantasies that resurrected that sleeping giant of a couture house, Christian Dior. But his career is ending in disgrace. How?

1. Enter a five+ year design funk. Raising the bar on past transgressions using the same techniques you always have delivers diminishing returns.
2. Deal with your fading fortunes by turning to drink and drugs. Surround yourself with famous, sympathetic sycophants who shrug off your dependencies as if they are adorable quirks.
3. Drink alone in public places, and wait for provocation. And then say the most provocative, illegal things you can think of, because you deeply crave some kind of reaction, any reaction.
4. Become a victim of modern surveillance culture, and receive career-destroying blowback beyond your wildest expectations.

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5. Eat Out.

Rudi Gernreich was a true fashion innovator with a keen ability to cook publicity into his designs, pushing the envelope of modernity and taste. His various attempts to sell out never came to any lasting fruition. In a bizarre branding derailment, his final venture lent his name to a line of soup. How?

1. Generate large amounts of publicity. Be better at spreading ideas than selling clothes.
2. Stay resolutely West Coast. Location matters – even more so half a century ago than it does today.
3. Design yourself into a corner – deconstruct swimwear to the point that it barely exists, push androgyny to the level where tension between gender conventions is a moot point.
4. Never mind fashion, make soup. Soup is more nutritious than fashion.

The original youth street style was all about poor kids dressing up rich. This observation, while watching this show, got me thinking about modern street style, and how it has flipped- rich kids dressing up poor. I was impressed by the pride that the Teds who were interviewed demonstrated, and how the modern attitude of hipsters is such a striking polarity – denial and distancing. It got me thinking about the relationships between money, youth culture, attitudes and perception. Is there a pattern here?

Like all fashions, youth tribes tend to fluctuate between rebellion and affirmation. Let’s take a look.

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Rebellion – the Teds. Poor kids dressing up rich.

Teds were working class, blue collar workers, but on the weekend they cleaned up good, dressing inspired by the wealthy leisure class of the Edwardian era. Teds were, and are, proud. The style statement was upwardly mobile – they dressed to show that they were just as good as the upper classes.

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Affirmation – the Mods. Rich kids dressing up rich.

Mods were proudly middle class. They didn’t want to just dress up on the weekend – they wanted, and got, the kind of jobs that allowed them to dress well every day. Mods have a lot of pride, reflecting how satisfying it must have been to achieve middle-class comforts unknown to any previous generation. That said, they provoked a lot of antipathy from other contemporary tribes, probably because taking pride in privilege is invariably perceived as snobbish.

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Rebellion – the Hippies. Rich kids dressing up poor.

Hippies weren’t proud to be privileged. Even though they owed their considerable leisure, education, and liberty to the military industrial complex, they actively rebelled against their parents. Besides some major parties, they did have a major role in popularizing social justice, racial equality and sexual freedom. None of the other style tribes could claim credit for playing any kind of role in real political change.

That said, most people who look, act, and talk like hippies reject the label rather than taking pride in it, and the modern perception of hippies tends to be dismissive. I think this relates to “nostalgie de la boue”. This refers to when rich people romanticize poverty, for instance when Marie Antoinette and her ladies and waiting would dress up as milkmaids for fun and pretend to milk cows. Nostalgie de la boue provokes lingering distaste because it tends to be condescending and contrived. No matter what, rich dressing up as poor is disingenuous, and the result is that members of the tribes in this quadrant tend towards distancing and denial of their own membership.

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Affirmation – the Punks. Poor kids dressing up poor.

Of all the tribes, punk strikes me as having the fiercest kind of pride, which makes sense because their style statement is an elaborate affirmation of authenticity – they embraced rejection, creating embellishment out of trash. These contradictions makes them an outlier on my axis diagram.

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Affirmation – the Casuals. Rich kids dressing up rich.

Casuals were, like the Mods, proudly middle-class. The difference was a focus on sport and leisure rather than white collar work. Casuals take the hit from fashion circles for popularizing workout clothes as street wear and leading logo fetishization. Despite that, they display genuine pride – and share with the Mods an external perception of snobbishness.

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Rebellion – the Chavs. Poor kids dressing up rich.

Chavs are essentially a further development of Casuals but without the money. From the outside they are almost universally mocked as the style statement is a tasteless exaggeration of the already borderline Casual ethos. Yet, they are essentially the last of the indigenous British style tribes, a modern iteration of the Teds, but without the redeeming factor of labour.

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Rebellion – the Hipsters. Rich kids dressing up poor.

Modern youth suffers, if you can call it that, from an excess of advantage. When I walk through my gentrified neighbourhood in East London, there are upscale shops like Labour and Wait that sell tools and household cleaning items presented like precious objects, and the streets are full of boys wearing slightly too artfully paint-splattered jeans and un-scuffed work boots holding iPhones in their soft, un-calloused hands.

Nostalgie de la boue: we fetishize “functional” work because our own so-called work is so ephemeral and indulgent. Hipsters fixate on the trappings of manual labour with the same fervour that the Teds romanticized the clothing of a lost leisure class.

Hipsterism is fascinating to study and comment on for a lot of reasons. The self-loathing quality of it is quite striking. So much of its rebellion is turned on itself – a tangled Ouroboros of reactionary impulses that others have discussed at length. For the purposes of this post, I’ll limit the commentary to this: hipsters are hyper-aware that they are disingenuous brats, and unlike their counterparts the hippies, they have no redemptive qualities.

I say this as someone who admits to harbouring more than a few hipster traits. I have a blog and an indefinite 21st century job description, and sometimes I catch myself describing what I do in unnecessarily self-deprecating language.

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So, is there a pattern? So much modern style movements reflect attitudes towards social mobility – but somehow, social mobility itself somehow still suffers from a weirdly feudal bias, like we’ve never been able to shake the birthright business. Rich>Poor and even Poor>Rich still have inauthenticity problems to this day.

Rich Dressing Up Poor suffer from the most complicated psychological contortions. Because they’re both highly educated and downwardly socially mobile – it doesn’t make a lot of sense relative to history, which is what makes the phenomenon so interesting.

Modern style tribes, Hipsters and Chavs, suffer from strong disdain – I think what they both have in common is a lack of meaningful work combined with hyper-access to products and information. They are spoiled and it is not endearing, though I feel sympathy for both groups. Their (our) future is so complex and uncertain, I don’t want to begrudge them (us) whatever indulgence they (we) enjoy now.

Future style tribes will likely be a reaction to hipsterism, which on macro terms will be precipitated by an end to prosperity. I think the next iteration could be a modern counterpart to punk – the aesthetics of scarcity. Cynical, perhaps? Is it weird that I consider the possible emergence of a new style movement an upside of a major recession?

For my first ever podcast, I decided to interview my Oma, Herta Meder, not only to get familiar with how to use audio, but also because I’ve inherited my own interest in fashion from Oma and I’ve always wanted to record her experiences with fashion.

As my first ever phone interview and podcast, it is not very edited and moves a bit slowly – but if you do listen, you will hear my Oma’s stories about working with a dressmaker in Germany just after the Second World War, being an immigrant wife in Canada and creating her own wardrobe inspired by the fashions of the time, and eventually working for clothing manufacturers in Winnipeg and Toronto in the 1970s and 80s.

These images, taken from slides, are of my Oma modeling an outfit on the runway, which she designed for a competition at the end of the 1960s. It was a miniskirt, hat and cape created from a Hudson’s Bay blanket.  Oma won a prize for this creation – a Pfaff sewing machine.

Thank you so much Oma, for everything!

Final Fashion can be very serendipitous sometimes.  I never know who is reading, and I never know who is touched by my words and pictures until they reach out and touch back.

Gwendolyne of Gwendolyne Hats was a silent reader who wanted to meet me, and she offered her support as a sponsor – but more than that she has a lot to say to me in person that couldn’t be communicated online.  Gwendolyne doesn’t match the usual profile of my site’s visitors – she’s older and not very interested in fashion – and rather than asking me questions she is compelled to pass on her own knowledge.  It was apparent when she reached out that it was a cue for me to listen and learn.

Gwendolyne makes hats that reveal a passion for materials and objects with substance and provenance.  She is attracted to richly textured, warm materials with a sense of history and combines them in an intuitive, careful way.  In particular she is fascinated with the products of the industrial age in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and patronizes the dwindling number of modern manufacturers who have preserved the same equipment and techniques.

Besides collecting textiles, Gwendolyne is an avid collector of buttons, and after she showed me her button collection briefly the first time we met, my mind would return to it whenever I thought of her, with a persistent curiousity.  So I asked to come visit again and talk buttons.

Buttons are tiny objects which I’ve never examined so closely before, though I touch them every day.  As someone trained as a designer, I’ve thought about buttons in terms of size and colour, how they might complement a garment, and the technicalities of creating a closure, but I’ve never really appreciated buttons as objects in their own right before.

The first button Gwendolyne showed me was this unusual button with a motif of what looks like a dog jumping through a tire – in fact the button is made of vulcanized rubber, and on the back there is the name Goodyear and a patent number.  (You can right-click any of these photos to see them larger.)  As you can see Gwendolyne has a lot of these rubber buttons, many by Goodyear and some by other manufacturers.  She says that they smell when they get wet.

The story of these buttons is fascinating.  Mr. Goodyear was the inventor of the vulcanization process, an innovation in manufacturing that made him very rich.  In time, his process, though patented, was taken by other manufacturers.  Mr. Goodyear spent his fortune trying to protect his patents, a fight which left him poor by the time he died.

“This button is about remembering to let go,” Gwendolyne says.

Gwendolyne sometimes chooses buttons to use as embellishments on her hats, and she puts them on tiny scraps of leather as talismans, zipper pulls or key chains.  I asked her if the buttons suggest the hat design or the other way around?  She told me that she doesn’t buy materials with a particular design in mind, and that the embellishments and fabrics come together in an intuitive way rather than a particular order.

These buttons made from another example of another industrial-age innovation based on new materials found in the colonies – vegetable ivory.  The South American nut above would be carved and coloured into buttons with a hard, light quality.  At the top of the picture are two picture buttons with a design which was pressed into them.  These buttons are another example of imitation.  Motifs are often copied, as they have always been, and often simplified or changed in small ways.

These colourful buttons are from the 1950s, made with plastic.  Besides figurative designs, they show an exploration of the possibilities of techniques like extrusion.  The motifs and colours are brash and outrageous – bowls of fruit like Carmen Miranda hats, heavy-handed Orientalism.

These are glass buttons.  The ones on the bottom left are from Victorian times, extravagant in embellishment yet subdued in black jet.  You can see some different types of shanks on these buttons – Gwendolyne has as much fascination with the backs of the buttons as she does with the fronts – the attention paid to the hidden part of the button reveals the amount of care that was given to the manufacturing of these buttons, which were assembled by hand, sometimes from many tiny pieces.

The final set of buttons shown here share human figures in common – and on the left in particular, hands.  The beauty of these buttons, filled with tiny details and often multiple parts for a single button, is exquisite.

The last button Gwendolyne pointed out to me is the small button in the middle left with a fist on it.  She says that she believes this may be a symbol of the suffragette movement – who are known to have used such small subtle embellishments as quiet indicators of their unconventional beliefs.  There is no way to know for sure, but all of the determination and protest contained in such a small object does give it this palpable sense of power. It stands apart from the other pretty, decorative buttons in a way that is remarkable.

Thank you Gwendolyne for showing me your work and your buttons, and for teaching me to be open, to look more closely, and listen carefully.