Bennekom Jop van - Buttoned-up: a survey of a curious fashion phenomenon

Here, and on the cover, 25-year-old Giordano Cioni, a production manager living in East London. Photograph by Benjamin Alexander Huseby.

The editors of Fantastic Man explore a curious fashion phenomenon

When departing the East London Line at Shoreditch High Street, one might choose to visit one of the several fashionable menswear retailers that thrive in the Borough of Hackney. It is likely that one will notice a distinct similarity in the way these shops employees and customers have dressed themselves: theyll be wearing their shirts with the buttons done up all the way to the top, the collars closed tight around their necks. This approach to dressing is not the most comfortable one by any means, but in this area of London and many other corners of modern society it is miraculously popular.

Buttoned-up has become the norm.

The simple act of fastening a shirts highest button and the plainness of the look it creates belies a variety of intricate and complex intentions. It presents an appearance that is at once proper in its neatness and rebellious in the deliberate exclusion of a tie. Buttoning up stakes a particular territory for its wearer, especially in East London, an area famed for its creative industry. It suggests something puritanical, an almost Amish eschewing of decoration, a refusal to reveal anything below the neck. It infantilizes, recalling images of first days of school and boys being dressed by their mothers. It is an up-tight look dating back to the restrained aggression of the mod sixties. It is virtually unavoidable in menswear fashion imagery, where it easily provides a sense of considered smartness. Buttoning up is contemporary but timeless.

The following pages present an attempt to understand the looks basis in fashion, history and pop culture what motivates men to expose themselves to the discomforts and delights of buttoning up.

Gert Jonkers & Jop van Bennekom,
editors of Fantastic Man

White cotton shirt, photographed by Maurice Scheltens and Liesbeth Abbenes for Fantastic Man No.5, 2007.

To Button Up

Why men in East London dress the way they do, by Paul Flynn

Patricks school uniform in rural Scotland was a white shirt and V-neck jumper, no tie. He says the boys would wear their shirts one button open and the girls maybe one more. Just teenagers, loosening up. When he was sixteen he happened upon a picture in a magazine of Orange Juice guitarist James Kirk. He was holding his guitar and he had a really long trench coat and a bowl cut, says Patrick. He had his shirt buttoned up. I thought he looked like the coolest person in the world. Prompted by this revelation, Patrick decided in a small moment of schoolboy rebellion to follow his lead.

This was his first personal styling decision, inspired by a whimsical Glasgow pop group nobody could guess the reach of at the time. Orange Juices deftly amateurish fusing of black groove with white noise, not to mention their charity-shop chic, would set a template for the future sound and look of bands who were interested in any of the crossover points on the tangent between wee small hours disco and college rock.