Buttons themselves are often treated as secondary to a garment, but experimenting with dyeing and finishing them opened up new possibilities for us.
We began with rust dyeing on small wooden buttons. The process mirrored rust dyeing on fabric - moisture, iron fragments, and time. Because the surface area was so small, the marks were concentrated, and the color shift appeared more dramatic. Some buttons took on mottled patterns like miniature maps.
Unlike fabric, which continues to breathe and change, buttons reacted more slowly once dried, but they carried the same unpredictability. Alongside this, we worked with ebonised wooden buttons:
Ebonising is a process of treating wood with an iron solution so that it reacts with the tannins naturally present in the wood, turning it black. Historically, this method was used as a cheaper alternative to true ebony, a dense black hardwood valued since antiquity for its color and rarity. In the 18th and 19th century Europe, ebonised wood was common in furniture and ornament, a way of achieving depth and darkness without importing scarce materials. On buttons, the technique transformed ordinary pale woods into an even dark finish.
Using both rust-dyed and ebonised buttons in garments linked two different traditions of working with iron—the slow oxidation that leaves stains, and the chemical reaction that fixes black permanently into organic material. In both, the small scale of the button became a site of experiment for decay and permanence.
