Cute as a button

In her vibrant Parisian haberdashery, Brigitte Renaud has amassed a unique collection of buttons from the late 19th and 20th centuries. Carefully arranged by colour, material and style, they look like so many candies. "The buttons say a lot about the origin and the time of clothes," says Renaud. "They're precious testimonies of the technical advances and the artistic movements of an era. For example, the buttons from the '30s were often made with newly invented plastics such as Bakelite, Galalite or Lucite, and were infused with art deco patterns."

Hovering at the junction of art and design, did you know that artists such as Alberto Giacometti, Fernand Léger, Sonia Delaunay and Pablo Picasso created buttons? Between the two World Wars, renowned Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli made innovative and arty buttons her trademark. "She worked with Lucien Weingott, a peculiar artist who created buttons in his kitchen with all kinds of natural materials: seeds, nut shells, resins," explains Renaud.