What do you use every day that is small and large, worthless and beyond price? It's easily found in the gutter, yet you may never be able to replace it. You are always losing it, but it faithfully protects you; sexy and uptight, it is knitted in to your affections or it may give you nightmares. It has led to conflict, fostered and repressed political and religious change, and epitomizes the great aesthetic movements. It's Eurocentric, and is found all over the world. On the Button is an inventive and unusual exploration of the cultural history of the button, illustrated with a...

Men in khaki and grey squatting in the trenches, women at work, gender bending in goggles, with overalls on over their trousers. What people wear matters. Well illustrated, this book tells the stories of what people on both sides wore on the front line and on the home front through the seismic years of World War I. Nina Edwards reveals fresh aspects of the war through the prism of the smallest details of personal dress, of clothes, hair and accessories, both in uniform and civilian wear. She explores how, during a period of extraordinary upheaval and rapid change, wearing a certain perfume,...