A Connoisseur's Cornucopia of Buttons

I'd driven by it many times and always been intrigued by the unassuming, vintage look of the shop that said "treasure hunt inside" to me. But the tiny storefront on San Pablo Avenue with a sign on the building saying simply "Buttons" never seemed to be open.

Then one day, after lunch nearby, I found it open and walked in.  Instantly I knew I was onto something special – a tiny shop filled with treasures that otherwise you can find, if you're lucky, only at garage sales and on eBay. The shop's two walls are covered with buttons, and a glass case is full of button gems of various shapes and colors. Above the buttons on the walls are numerous articles about the shop from various newspapers and other publications.

I told owner Mary Sortile I was looking for shank buttons for a white blouse that had lost its covered buttons in the wash. I don't like plastic buttons; they look cheap to me. I love the weight and the luster of shell buttons, but they're hard to find these days. Not so at Exclusive Buttons. Sortile walked straight to a section with white, mother-of-pearl buttons. "Let's try these," she said. We tried fitting a button through a buttonhole of my shirt, and bingo!

My task done, I asked Sortile about her shop. Exclusive Buttons was started 54 years ago in Berkeley by her husband, Vince Sortile, and moved to the current location in the early '80s. After Vince passed away three years ago, Mary, his partner in business, took over the shop, which is open only on Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. While Sortile said her husband was the one who loved buttons and knew everything about them, it was clear after talking to her a few minutes that she's no amateur.

The buttons are organized by color and type. Sortile seemed to know where everything is in the massive collection. She said her husband organized them and that she just keeps them the way he had them. The carded buttons covering the two walls are sorted mostly by color. The drawers contain more buttons sorted by material: glass crystal, mother of pearl and abalone, horn, bone, casein (milk protein), vegetable ivory (a nut of a palm tree), Bakelite, and more.

"There's no plastic here," Sortile said. Many of the buttons are one-of-a-kind; all are new old stock (old stock that has never been sold), stuff you can't get anywhere else.

I found an entire drawer dedicated to tortoise shell-like Bakelite buttons that Vince Sortile bought in the mid '80s from a coat company in San Francisco. The company had been in business for 50 years and was moving to New York and Los Angeles, but they didn't want to freight all their buttons. So he bought them all. It took Vince and Mary three weeks to transport all the buttons from San Francisco to their shop. The buttons are chunky and heavy with lots of character — nothing like the flimsy varieties you find at large fabric stores.

Sortile showed me several drawers full of vintage crystal buttons made in the former Czechoslovakia. Intricately designed, colorful and iridescent, they reminded me of Art Nouveau jewelry made by Lalique and Tiffany. These are the only buttons Sortile  purchases for the store these days. Everything else was bought and collected by Vince.

Small, beautiful, and functional, buttons can be an ultimate expression of fashion whether they're on a cardigan or worn as a bracelet. Buttons are also small embodiments of history and culture. The earliest buttons were used as ornamentation rather than fasteners.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute website shows intricate buttons from the 18th and 19th centuries made with rubies and diamonds, as well as buttons of ivory with portraits or miniature paintings of scenes. There are also buttons made of intricately carved ivory or cameo, and brightly colored enamel, and more.

Button collecting is also a popular hobby. The National Button Society and its regional clubs organize shows and give advice to novice button fanciers about how to collect and classify them.

While the shop is easy to miss from the street, many customers from around the country and beyond come looking for that special button. Glancing through the guest registry, I found names from Oregon and Nevada, and from Pennsylvania, Florida and Virginia. Someone from Finland had found her way to the shop. The business been written up more than a few times, including in the Chicago Tribune. Sortile proudly told me too, that Vince made it into the International Who's Who Historical Society. He was a true button aficionado.

While I was shopping, a woman walked in with a beautiful cardigan she had knitted. It was her second or third time at the shop looking for the perfect buttons for her sweater. Mary pulled out a small collection that she had prepared and laid the buttons on the sweater.

"This one's too green," she said. She pulled out a clear Czech glass button. The woman liked it, and now she needed to make sure that there were enough of them. Finding a large number (more than four of five) of matching buttons can be a challenge in a store like this, but persistence and creativity pay off. As Sortile said, "Buttons often make or break an outfit."