This article is taken from the July 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
“Jamais un bouton sans boutonnière,” adjured Coco Chanel, all-time couturière legend, part-time cabaret chanteuse and one-time lover (she had many) of Captain “Boy” Capel. Of course, Chanel was not right about everything. After all, she was also a sometime collaboratrice of Vichy France and SS spymaster Walter Schellenberg, but like many amongst the French elite, from Maurice Chevalier to François Mitterrand, de Gaulle’s dégradation nationale did not do her too much harm.
However, on the matter of lapel decoration, Coco Chanel was bang on the button. At one time in the last century, anyone who considered themselves a gentleman would consider themselves undressed without a buttonhole. Like most things belonging to a better time, there are rules of attachment.
First and foremost, the bud’s stem must be pushed through the lapel hole and not pinned to the front of the coat, unless encased in a George V buttonhole holder. Second, the calyx should always follow the stem through the hole so the flower itself sits pat and not proud against the cloth. In this way the buttonhole looks out to the world rather than up its wearer’s nose.
Third, bijou is beautiful. Whilst a moth orchid might have looked fine on the frock coat of empire-building buccaneer Joe Chamberlain, by the 1920s and the golden age of men’s clothing, the big boutonnière had been mothballed. From there on in, smart meant small.
Night blooming jasmine in your lapel will have heads turning all day long
Worn widely by kings and statesmen, mughals and moguls, everyone from the Aga Khan to Rudolf Valentino walked out with a flossie, and often the most flagrantly fragrant they could find. Because in Hays Code Hollywood, signals had to be, quite literally, scent: Dashiell Hammett’s Joel Cairo donned a white carnation above a gardenia-infused handkerchief with which he pursued the Maltese Falcon. It was not his Beretta but his buttonhole that made him the obvious enemy of Sam Spade. Of course gardenias have always been exotic flowers, but they are not the only aromatic arrangement. Night blooming jasmine in your lapel will have heads turning all day long, as will an echinacea or a scabiosa.
Even students fall prey to the spell. At Oxford, undergraduates still wear a carnation for their first, intermediate and final examinations, beginning with white, moving to pink, then, culminating in crimson.
At Buckingham Palace garden parties, those government whips that moonlight as Household Officers always dressed with cornflower boutonnières, although I shudder to think what Starmer’s stormtroopers pin to their shoulders. I suppose they might watch Charlie Chaplin’s silent masterpiece City Lights to seek inspiration. The King, an avowed buttonholer, is fond of the pink dianthus Devon Wizard, a small and unostentatious bloom which sits harmoniously with a silk handkerchief beneath it. Gypsophilia is another discreet bloom of tiny white florets, years ago called “Baby’s Breath”, with which to distinguish an otherwise dull suit coat.
These days such ornamentation seems relegated to weddings and the races, which is a great shame — for buttonhole flowers should be fun to wear. They should lift the spirit as well as the lapel and make the most retiring dullard resemble a dandy.
I remember many years ago at Ascot when a group of us regular racegoers decided on a little light ribbing of another good friend, James. We ordered for him the most outrageously outré arrangement: a voluptuous rose, pearl-pinned and set all about in a diamante cabochon halo. More corsage than boutonnière and sparkling like a Belle Époque demi-monde in the Rue Bergère, it was enough to make even Joel Cairo blush. James, who is no dullard, wore it with distinction all afternoon, like Monolulu of the Falasha but without the black magic.
Oscar Wilde observed that “a really well-made buttonhole is the only link between art and nature”. It is time to bring back the boulevardier and the buttonhole — and rediscover the missing link.
