I have buttoned thousands of shirts in my life. Maybe tens of thousands. (I am a mom of five.) I am a grown adult with multiple degrees and a functioning brain, and yet the first time I grabbed my husband’s flannel to throw on before walking the dog, I stood there for a full 30 seconds, brow furrowed, hands fumbling like I’d never encountered a button before. Why did it feel so strange? Was I having a stroke?
No. I was just experiencing one of the most common and most casually accepted little fashion quirks: the fact that buttons and zippers are on opposite sides depending on whether the clothing is designed for men or women. I don’t know how, in all my years of dressing myself, I’d never noticed it before. Men’s buttons and zippers go on the right side; women’s go on the left. It’s so standard that we rarely think to ask why or even notice it, and yet once you start pulling on that thread, you end up in a surprisingly interesting tangle of history, class politics, military strategy and fragile emperor egos.
Buckle up, and let’s dive into the details. (The buckle, for what it’s worth, can go on either side, regardless of your gender.)
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Have buttons and zippers always been like this?
Not exactly—this isn’t ancient history. Buttons themselves date back to around 2800 BCE, but the gendered side placement is much more recent. According to fashion historian and author Robert Ossant, “most button clothing design became standardized in the late 19th century, when we shifted from all clothing being bespoke to the modern system of production.” Before that, clothing was made to measure for individuals, and any rules about placement were more informal traditions set by the tailoring houses of London and Paris. John Smith, a fellow fashion historian and the vice president of fashion design at Poshéle, traces the convention to the 17th and 18th centuries, when tailors began systematically applying it to their clientele.
As for zippers, they weren’t invented until the beginning of the 20th century. Elias Howe patented an early “Automatic, Continuous Clothing Closure” in 1851, but the modern zipper wasn’t perfected until Gideon Sundback did it in the early 1900s. They weren’t common in clothing, however, until the 1930s. By then, Ossant says, the gendered button convention was already so established that zippers simply inherited it: “The convention of right over left for the concealing flap reflected the button style for womenswear, and the opposite for zips used in menswear.”
Why are buttons and zippers on different sides for men and women?
The short answer: class, convenience and a few centuries of deeply entrenched habit. The longer answer involves a remarkable number of things that have nothing to do with buttons or zippers.
Men needed quick access—to weapons
For men, the logic was entirely practical. Right-handed men (and about 90% of the population is right-handed) could more easily grip and manipulate a button or zipper when it was positioned on the right. This was especially important for soldiers and armed men who needed to quickly reach inside their coats for weapons. (Which apparently happened a lot back in the day?) Having the dominant hand control the buttons—holding the button between the thumb and forefinger and pushing it through—was simply more efficient. And the same logic applied to the button or zipper placement on pants, but for, ahem, a different type of quick release.
Wealthy women had someone to dress them
Here’s where it gets classist and sexist. Wealthy women of the 17th and 18th centuries didn’t dress themselves; they had ladies’ maids and servants to do it for them. A servant facing her mistress would be using her own right hand to manipulate the buttons, which meant the buttons needed to be on the left side of the garment. “It was largely a class and practicality distinction rather than a purely aesthetic one,” says Smith. In other words, the entire reason women’s clothing is designed the way it is was to make it easier for someone else to do the buttoning.
Ossant describes women’s clothing of the time as “more complicated, with lace-up undergarments, corsets, petticoats, added in ever more restrictive layers, so having someone help was essential.” The seamstresses who made these garments followed instructions to the letter. “[They] would never interfere with a design and change the placement,” Ossant says. “This would ruin the entire design.”
There’s also a breastfeeding theory floating around: that left-side buttons allowed nursing mothers to more easily open their tops while holding an infant in their dominant right arm. While it’s plausible, as a mom who nursed babies for nearly a decade, I’m side-eyeing this one. You need to breastfeed on both sides or you will become painfully engorged (and lopsided), and most women alternate which side they start with, so button placement is a moot point. Also, I preferred to hold my baby in my left hand so my right (dominant) hand was free.
Horseback riding may have played a role
“One of my favorite alternative theories is that the buttons were placed on the left due to how the wind passed over a woman’s body while riding sidesaddle,” Ossant says, explaining that women typically placed both their legs over the left side of the horse, so as they rode forward, the wind would pull open a blouse that opened to the right. “So some believe the placket (the fabric with the buttonholes) and buttons were swapped to ensure a woman riding sidesaddle on a horse didn’t have to worry about the wind blowing open her clothing,” he says. I feel like romance writers could really do a lot with this idea.
And then there’s Napoleon
If you prefer your history with a side of drama, Ossant offers another one of his favorite (if admittedly far-fetched) alternative theories: “Napoleon was alleged to have been enraged by women mocking his ‘right arm tucked in shirt’ look and ordered that women’s clothing was reversed so they could no longer mock him.”
Is this true? Probably not. Is it delightful? Absolutely.
Mass manufacturing locked it all in
Whatever the origins, the Industrial Revolution cemented these conventions permanently. When clothing shifted from bespoke to mass-produced in the late 19th century, factories needed clear, repeatable rules and patterns. “This came on the back of European-wide uniform standardization to make armies more efficient,” Ossant explains. “The fashion industry simply copied.”
Once those rules were built into the machines, the die was cast—literally.
OK, fine, but why is clothing still like that?
The honest answer is habit … and also the remarkable human capacity to not notice something until it’s pointed out. (Guilty!) “We have kept the gendered closure system mostly because people are used to it,” Ossant says. “It’s something most people don’t notice until it’s flipped, and then they’re confused.”
Smith adds a practical component as well. “Retooling production lines costs money,” he explains, “and as long as the majority of consumers aren’t actively complaining, brands have little financial incentive to change.”
There’s also a brand-identity element, particularly in outerwear. “The placement of a zipper or a set of buttons is part of the garment’s signature,” Smith explains. “Think of iconic motorcycle jackets: The asymmetric off-center zip is as recognizable as any logo. Changing it would feel like altering the product’s DNA.”
Design schools further reinforce the tradition. Both experts confirm that button and zipper placement is taught as a technical standard in garment construction curricula. “Design schools teach the established gendered method for inserting zip closures or button-up fronts because this is now an established norm and what people expect,” says Ossant, who adds a personal anecdote. He owns a man’s shirt that accidentally had its button closure made the “wrong” way. “Every time I put it on, it proves a little difficult because we are so used to the standard way assigned to our genders,” he says. So if even a fashion professional with full knowledge of the convention trips up, the rest of us never had a chance.
Is one side easier than the other to button and zip?
Yes, and this is the part where women discover they’ve been getting a raw deal their entire lives. Right-handed people will find men’s button placement more intuitive: The dominant right hand holds and guides the button, while the left hand holds the placket. For women’s clothing, that dynamic is reversed, meaning right-handed women are working slightly against their natural dexterity every single time they get dressed.
“The advantage of the historical system was ergonomics,” Smith says. “Each garment was optimized for who was fastening it and how.” And, essentially, women’s clothing was optimized for a right-handed servant, not the right-handed woman wearing it.
Left-handed people get their own version of this frustration, and they tend to find women’s garments slightly more intuitive by the same logic. And with zippers, Smith notes, the direction of the zip track matters enormously for comfort and ease. “A stiff or awkwardly placed zip on a structured leather garment is genuinely frustrating to use, especially when the leather is new and hasn’t yet broken in.”
Meanwhile, right-handed women have simply adapted. “It’s just another annoying inconvenience women face in everyday life,” Ossant says, in what may be the most understated sentence ever written about fashion history. This particular quirk may not rise to the level of the famous pocket disparity in women’s clothing, but it’s very much in the same family.
Will this fashion quirk ever change?
Slowly, yes. Ossant predicts that “more clothing [will be] designed as unisex and serve the 90% dominant right-handed population.” Smith is similarly optimistic: “We’re already seeing it in the market. High-end designers and outerwear brands are increasingly offering styles with centered zips, reversible closures or explicitly gender-neutral hardware placement.”
Major fashion houses, including Gucci and Stella McCartney, have launched gender-neutral or unisex lines, and the category has been growing steadily across the industry. “As consumers become more vocal about wanting clothing that fits how they actually live rather than how tradition dictates, the industry will follow,” Smith says.
That said, don’t expect to go shopping this weekend and find everything magically flipped. The machines that make the garments are already built. The patterns are already standardized. Vintage clothing already enforces this standard. And a significant portion of the population has spent decades internalizing which way to reach. As Ossant candidly says: “Men have never and would never have been inconvenienced. Whereas right-handed women have had to put up with a lifetime of it being slightly inconvenient, followed by an era of having to get used to flipping.”
So my confusion when I grabbed my husband’s shirt is not some kind of adulting failure. It is the result of several centuries of servants, soldiers, industrial machinery and possibly one very petty Napoleon. But progress is coming. In the meantime, take comfort in the fact that you now have a genuinely interesting thing to say at parties.
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Sources:
- John Smith, fashion historian and vice president of fashion design at Poshéle; interviewed, June 5, 2026
- Robert Ossant, fashion historian and author of The Art of Couture Embroidery; interviewed, June 5, 2026
- Smithsonian Libraries and Archives: “The Up and Down History of the Zipper”
- Retail Dive: “Consumers want gender-neutral retail clothing”
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