The Small Parts
The Small Parts
Hardware is where most clothing quietly fails.
The cloth gets all the attention. The pieces that actually end a garment's life cost a few cents each and nobody can name them.
Ballast
Corozo is the seed of the tagua palm, from the lowland rainforest of Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, and northern Peru. It is dense enough that people call it vegetable ivory, and under a microscope the cell structure genuinely does resemble ivory.
It reached Europe as ballast. Wooden ships crossing from South America needed weight low in the hull, and sand was dangerous because it soaked up water and grew heavier. The nuts were heavy, plentiful, and would not absorb.
A carver in Hamburg started cutting the ones that came off the ships, and the button trade followed. A German firm set up in Ecuador in 1895. An Italian house followed around 1910.
What Buttons Used to Be
A United States survey in 1918 listed buttons made from vegetable ivory, metal, glass, silk, linen, lead, pearl, rubber, wood, buckhorn, bone, leather, porcelain, tin, zinc, and stone.
By the 1920s vegetable ivory held around a fifth of the American button market and was standard on suits and shirts. Plastic ended that.
Corozo is porous, so dye sinks into it rather than sitting on the surface. Cut one in half and the core is still white.
Shell
Mother of pearl is cut from the inner layer of shell. A single button can pass through as many as seventeen stages. Selection, peeling, cutting, abrading, polishing, dyeing, drilling. Every one is a slightly different piece of shell, and that is the point of it.
Our thermal henley carries custom Black Bear Brand shell buttons.
Brass, Snaps, Zippers
Custom poured brass. Vintage style zippers. A YKK donut button and a brass zipper fly on the jeans. On some pieces a vintage style Talon zipper with natural color tape, and YKK vintage style snaps backed with leather.
Hardware is where most pieces quietly fail. A button that cracks. A zipper that separates in the second year. A snap that lets go and never holds again. The cloth is fine and the garment is finished.
It is worth the money and it is worth the wait. Nobody notices good hardware. That is exactly what good hardware is.
A Way Of Life.
Shop the Story
the Vintage BLACK BEAR BRAND Jeans
the Vintage Rose Thermal Henley
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