Thursday 20 February 7:00 – 8:30pm [Online]
‘Variety and Choice: Birmingham Buttons and New Modes of Making’
Jen Dixon
© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.
Buttons were an important fashion adornment on eighteenth-century clothing, especially men’s clothing. Inside each circle were worlds of pattern, colour, texture and reflected light. Part of the desire for buttons included novelty, variety and choice in design, and Birmingham responded to this demand by developing an array of technologies, processes and materials which diversified the trade. This talk explores the social and cultural desire for buttons and how Birmingham produced mother-of-pearl and steel buttons which catered for this market.
Jen Dixon is a PhD researcher at University of Birmingham and an artist. Her interests are in design history and Birmingham manufacturing.
This seminar will be delivered via Zoom:
All Welcome!