Be Careful When You Button Your Buttons!🛑

Salut !

This week I'd like to just make a friendly reminder that also serves as a note to self: if you're buttoning a shirt without a mirror, it's useful to check if you buttoned the buttons correctly! 

Last weekend I was roaming around the centre of the city of Rouen with some friends and I was wearing a khaki pencil skirt with a paperbag waist, a white undershirt, white superga sneakers and a white safari-style button-up shirt. It was getting a bit cold as the sun was setting and I decided to close a couple of the buttons of my shirt. At that moment, I knew in the back of my mind that I should check if I buttoned them correctly, but...I didn't. 

As it happens, a few moments later we happened to run into some other friends and we said hi to them briefly. It was a nice chance encounter! There I was, trying to be chic in my white and khaki look, but not long after I started to think that it really doesn't feel like the shirt is on me normally, and what do you know, the shirt was all crooked on me because I hadn't buttoned it correctly!

I know, cry me a river! It's not that serious after all – maybe no one even noticed. In fact, if someone would've asked me about it, I could've almost said it was a conscious fashion choice: What's the point of buttoning the shirt properly anyway?🤪

Well, even though a crooked shirt may look interesting in some contexts, most of the time we do want to button things correctly, because otherwise we may end up looking like a drunkard! Yes, there is an expression in Finnish "juoponnapissa", which means that the buttons of a shirt or a jacket have not been buttoned properly, and its literal translation is a "drunkard's button".

The expression doesn't have much negative connotations though; it's just a funny way to say that the buttons and their holes aren't matching. But in any case I prefer to look clean and neat, and therefore, let us make two mental notes about this :

1. Remember to check your buttons!
2. If you see that a friend or a family member has an accidental "drunkard's button", speak up and let them know about it! Usually it's less awkward to hear about it from someone you know in the moment than to discover it yourself later. The same goes for smudged mascara, lipstick on teeth, streaks of badly applied foundation on your face, hairstyle malfunctions, open flys, skirts inside pantyhose and all of the myriad outfit and appearance malfunctions we can encounter. Let us make a pact to always let each other know about this sort of stuff even though it wouldn't bother us personally to speak with someone who has for example lipstick on their teeth.

Of course most of these malfunctions can be avoided by just looking well in the mirror in the morning and then checking quickly your outfit and makeup every once in a while during the day. Alas, none of us is perfect, and these things happen to the best and the most elegant of us. I bet even Audrey Hepburn had a fair amount of outfit malfunctions in her lifetime, and it still doesn't make her any less elegant. I'm sure she would've also wanted to be informed about it if something was off with her appearance. So let's remember this and move on with life despite all of the possible outfit malfunctions we can, and will, have in the future!

Have a stylish week with all of your buttons in place!

Bisous,

Elle

❣️Recent delights

• Speaking of buttons, I just remembered this funny monologue that Barbra Streisand did about a pearl button in her first tv special My Name Is Barbra in 1965. She also mentions in her autobiography My Name Is Barbra (2023) that actually the monologue had to be filmed without the audience, so it's fun to observe how well Barbra managed to time her jokes even without the audience, predicting where the laughs would come.