Button Up

The phrase Tender Buttons drew its first public breath in 1914 as the title of a Gertrude Stein opus. In 1964 it re-emerged, this time as the name of a petite button emporium on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Alas, Ms. Stein's book remains just another component of her oeuvre, but the store, like Ed Koch and the Statue of Liberty, has become a New York institution—a haven for button aesthetes and for those who merely need to replace what they just, dammit, lost. Now Diana Epstein and Millicent Safro, the high priestesses of this chic temple of fasteners, have produced a grand book called simply Buttons (Abrams). With a foreword by Jim Dine and preface byTom Wolfe, both longtime customers, the book is a dazzling cornucopia that charts the button's evolution—from bucolic eighteenth-century French enamels to racy American silk garter studs with Clara Bow faces—in an absorbing text by two women with a profound knowledge of their subject and a passion that corresponds.

R.M.