Think about how many shirts you have buttoned in your life. Hundreds? Thousands? And yet, the first time you reach for your spouse’s shirt or borrow a friend’s jacket, something feels completely off. Your fingers stumble. You double-check. You wonder for a split second if something is wrong with you.
Nothing is wrong with you. You just ran into one of the quietest quirks in fashion history: men’s buttons and zippers sit on the right side of the garment, and women’s sit on the left. Always have. Most of us never thought to ask why.
The answer turns out to be genuinely fascinating and involves soldiers, servants, sidesaddle riding, and possibly one very petty French emperor.
When Did This All Start?
Buttons themselves have been around since roughly 2800 BCE. But the practice of putting them on different sides for men and women is much more recent. According to fashion historian and author Robert Ossant, most button clothing design became standardized in the late 19th century, when manufacturing shifted from custom-made garments to mass production.
Fashion historian John Smith traces the convention back even further, to the tailoring houses of London and Paris in the 17th and 18th centuries, where tailors began applying it systematically to their clients.
As for zippers, they came along much later. Elias Howe patented an early version called an “Automatic, Continuous Clothing Closure” in 1851. The modern zipper wasn’t perfected until Gideon Sundback completed his design in the early 1900s, and zippers didn’t become common in clothing until the 1930s. By then, the button convention was so entrenched that zippers simply followed the same rules. As Ossant explains, “The convention of right over left for the concealing flap reflected the button style for womenswear, and the opposite for zips used in menswear.”
So Why the Different Sides?
For men, the reason was purely practical. About 90 percent of people are right-handed, and men’s buttons on the right let the dominant hand do the work, gripping and pushing the button through the hole. This mattered especially for soldiers and armed men who needed to reach inside their coats quickly.
For women, the story is more complicated and more than a little unfair.
Wealthy women in the 17th and 18th centuries did not dress themselves. They had ladies’ maids and servants who did it for them. A servant standing facing her mistress would use her own right hand to fasten the buttons, which meant those buttons needed to be on the left side of the garment. As Smith puts it, “It was largely a class and practicality distinction rather than a purely aesthetic one.”
Women’s clothing of that era was also extraordinarily complicated. Ossant describes it as featuring “lace-up undergarments, corsets, petticoats, added in ever more restrictive layers, so having someone help was essential.” The seamstresses who built these garments followed their instructions exactly and would never move a button’s placement on their own.
There is also a theory tied to horseback riding. Women typically rode sidesaddle, with both legs on the left side of the horse. Riding forward into the wind, a blouse that opened to the right could blow open. Moving the buttons to the left, Ossant explains, kept things properly closed. It is a small detail, but it makes a certain amount of sense.
And then there is Napoleon. Ossant describes it as one of his favorite “far-fetched” alternative theories: Napoleon was allegedly so irritated by women mocking his habit of tucking his right arm inside his shirt that he ordered women’s clothing to be reversed so they could no longer imitate him. Probably not true. Definitely entertaining.
Why Are Things Still This Way?
The Industrial Revolution locked everything in place. When clothing moved from custom-made to factory-produced in the late 19th century, manufacturers needed clear, repeatable patterns. “This came on the back of European-wide uniform standardization to make armies more efficient,” Ossant explains. “The fashion industry simply copied.” Once those rules were built into the machines, they stayed.
Today, Smith points out that changing those production lines costs real money. “As long as the majority of consumers aren’t actively complaining, brands have little financial incentive to change.” Button and zipper placement is also taught as a technical standard in design schools, further cementing the tradition with each new generation of designers.
Ossant himself owns a men’s shirt where the buttons were accidentally placed on the wrong side. Even he, a fashion professional who knows exactly why the convention exists, finds it disorienting every time he puts it on.
Does One Side Work Better Than the Other?
Yes, and this is where right-handed women may feel a little cheated. Right-handed people find men’s button placement more natural. Your dominant hand guides the button while your left holds the fabric steady. For women’s clothing, that dynamic is reversed, meaning right-handed women work slightly against their natural hand preference every single time they get dressed.
“The advantage of the historical system was ergonomics,” Smith says. “Each garment was optimized for who was fastening it and how.” The catch is that women’s clothing was optimized for a right-handed servant, not for the right-handed woman actually wearing it.
Left-handed people have their own experience entirely, and tend to find women’s garments slightly more intuitive for the same reason.
Is Change Coming?
Slowly, yes. Ossant predicts that more clothing will be designed as unisex, built to serve the roughly 90 percent of the population that is right-hand dominant. Smith agrees: “We’re already seeing it in the market. High-end designers and outerwear brands are increasingly offering styles with centered zips, reversible closures or explicitly gender-neutral hardware placement.”
Major fashion houses including Gucci and Stella McCartney have launched gender-neutral or unisex lines, and that category has been growing steadily across the industry.
But do not expect an overnight revolution. The machines are already built. The patterns are already set. And as Ossant notes, right-handed women have simply spent a lifetime adapting to a system that was never designed for them in the first place.