Watch an Italian woman try on a jacket and you will see her do something small and strange. Before she checks the shoulders, before she turns to look at the back, she looks down. Her fingers go to the front of the jacket and she turns one tiny thing over between her thumb and finger.
For years I assumed it was a habit of the older women in the shops. Then I caught myself doing it in every showroom, every season. It is the fastest quality test in Italian dressing, and almost nobody here at home ever runs it.
A valley in Lombardy that thinks small
In the flat country between Bergamo and Brescia, around towns like Palazzolo sull'Oglio and Grumello del Monte, there is a stretch of Lombardy that Italians call the button valley. The first factories opened there in the second half of the nineteenth century. Cheaper competition from abroad thinned it out from the 1990s on, but dozens of small firms are still at work, turning horn, resin and corozo into the fronts of Italian jackets.
Corozo is the one worth knowing. It is the seed of a South American palm, so hard and fine-grained that it has long been called vegetable ivory. It takes dye beautifully and shrugs off scratches, which is why you find it on good tailoring.
Then there is the merceria, the haberdashery every Italian town still has, where thread, ribbon and buttons are sold one at a time. In Santarcangelo di Romagna, near Rimini, Giorgio Gallavotti closed the family merceria his father had opened in the 1920s and turned his collection into the Museo del Bottone: thousands of buttons, some from the 1700s, laid out like a social history of the country. In Italy, a button is never an afterthought. It tells you who wore the coat.
What her fingers are checking
So, back to the woman in the fitting room. When she turns a button over, she is reading three things at once.
- Weight. A good button has a little heft and feels cool for a second. A hollow one feels like a toy, and makes the whole jacket feel like one.
- The sewing. A well-made jacket has its buttons sewn on a short stem of thread, so they sit up and the buttonhole closes around them without pulling. Stitched flat and tight, the front puckers the first time you fasten it.
- The match. Do the buttons belong to the cloth, or were they the cheapest thing in the drawer?
The third one is the real tell, and it leads to the habit that surprised me most.
The two-minute change
If the jacket is right and the buttons are wrong, she buys the jacket anyway. Then she walks to the merceria, chooses new ones, and sews them on that evening.
That is the whole secret. A plain jacket with thin plastic buttons looks like what it cost. The same jacket with horn, corozo or a quiet bit of shine looks considered, as if someone thought about it all the way to the last stitch. Italian women know the eye goes to the front of a jacket the way it goes to a face, and they refuse to let a few cents of plastic decide how the whole outfit reads.
When a jacket arrives with the right buttons already on, that is when she smiles. Look at the jacket in the first photo: a cropped black jacket and skirt set by Buby's in a nubby woven texture, finished with small jeweled buttons and a line of pearls at the collar and pockets. Those buttons are the reason it needs no necklace. The blazer-cut mini dress above, made in Italy by Tensione In, runs a double row of dark buttons down the front; they carry the look, so everything else can stay plain.
November is jacket season, even in Sarasota once the evenings cool. The next time you try one on, before you look in the mirror, look down. Turn one button over. You will be running the same small test Italian women have trusted for a century and a half, and you will never see a jacket quite the same way again.
Our jackets for the cooler months are together in the jackets collection. Go on, turn a button over.
She travels to Italy each season to hand-select the boutique's collection.
Keep reading
The Ten-Second Test Italian Women Run on Every White Shirt
The Blazer Italian Women Never Actually Take Off
