“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
– Abraham Lincoln, in “House Divided”
Here’s Why Buttons and Zippers Are on Different Sides of Clothing for Men and Women
Here’s Why Buttons and Zippers Are on Different Sides of Clothing for Men and Women
Here’s Why Buttons and Zippers Are on Different Sides of Clothing for Men and Women
READER’S DIGEST, GETTY IMAGES (2)
BY Charlotte Hilton Andersen
PUBLISHED ON Jun. 12, 2026
The answer involves aristocrats, Napoleon, weapons and so much drama—and it explains why women have been mildly inconvenienced every morning for centuries
I have buttoned thousands of shirts in my life. Maybe tens of thousands. (I am a mom of five.) I am a grown adult with multiple degrees and a functioning brain, and yet the first time I grabbed my husband’s flannel to throw on before walking the dog, I stood there for a full 30 seconds, brow furrowed, hands fumbling like I’d never encountered a button before. Why did it feel so strange? Was I having a stroke?
No. I was just experiencing one of the most common and most casually accepted little fashion quirks: the fact that buttons and zippers are on opposite sides depending on whether the clothing is designed for men or women. I don’t know how, in all my years of dressing myself, I’d never noticed it before. Men’s buttons and zippers go on the right side; women’s go on the left. It’s so standard that we rarely think to ask why or even notice it, and yet once you start pulling on that thread, you end up in a surprisingly interesting tangle of history, class politics, military strategy and fragile emperor egos.
Buckle up, and let’s dive into the details. (The buckle, for what it’s worth, can go on either side, regardless of your gender.)
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Have buttons and zippers always been like this?
Not exactly—this isn’t ancient history. Buttons themselves date back to around 2800 BCE, but the gendered side placement is much more recent. According to fashion historian and author Robert Ossant, “most button clothing design became standardized in the late 19th century, when we shifted from all clothing being bespoke to the modern system of production.” Before that, clothing was made to measure for individuals, and any rules about placement were more informal traditions set by the tailoring houses of London and Paris. John Smith, a fellow fashion historian and the vice president of fashion design at Poshéle, traces the convention to the 17th and 18th centuries, when tailors began systematically applying it to their clientele.
As for zippers, they weren’t invented until the beginning of the 20th century. Elias Howe patented an early “Automatic, Continuous Clothing Closure” in 1851, but the modern zipper wasn’t perfected until Gideon Sundback did it in the early 1900s. They weren’t common in clothing, however, until the 1930s. By then, Ossant says, the gendered button convention was already so established that zippers simply inherited it: “The convention of right over left for the concealing flap reflected the button style for womenswear, and the opposite for zips used in menswear.”
Why Buttons And Zippers Are On Different Sides
FOTOTECA GILARDI/GETTY IMAGES
Why are buttons and zippers on different sides for men and women?
The short answer: class, convenience and a few centuries of deeply entrenched habit. The longer answer involves a remarkable number of things that have nothing to do with buttons or zippers.
Men needed quick access—to weapons
For men, the logic was entirely practical. Right-handed men (and about 90% of the population is right-handed) could more easily grip and manipulate a button or zipper when it was positioned on the right. This was especially important for soldiers and armed men who needed to quickly reach inside their coats for weapons. (Which apparently happened a lot back in the day?) Having the dominant hand control the buttons—holding the button between the thumb and forefinger and pushing it through—was simply more efficient. And the same logic applied to the button or zipper placement on pants, but for, ahem, a different type of quick release.
Wealthy women had someone to dress them
Here’s where it gets classist and sexist. Wealthy women of the 17th and 18th centuries didn’t dress themselves; they had ladies’ maids and servants to do it for them. A servant facing her mistress would be using her own right hand to manipulate the buttons, which meant the buttons needed to be on the left side of the garment. “It was largely a class and practicality distinction rather than a purely aesthetic one,” says Smith. In other words, the entire reason women’s clothing is designed the way it is was to make it easier for someone else to do the buttoning.
Ossant describes women’s clothing of the time as “more complicated, with lace-up undergarments, corsets, petticoats, added in ever more restrictive layers, so having someone help was essential.” The seamstresses who made these garments followed instructions to the letter. “[They] would never interfere with a design and change the placement,” Ossant says. “This would ruin the entire design.”
There’s also a breastfeeding theory floating around: that left-side buttons allowed nursing mothers to more easily open their tops while holding an infant in their dominant right arm. While it’s plausible, as a mom who nursed babies for nearly a decade, I’m side-eyeing this one. You need to breastfeed on both sides or you will become painfully engorged (and lopsided), and most women alternate which side they start with, so button placement is a moot point. Also, I preferred to hold my baby in my left hand so my right (dominant) hand was free.
Horseback riding may have played a role
“One of my favorite alternative theories is that the buttons were placed on the left due to how the wind passed over a woman’s body while riding sidesaddle,” Ossant says, explaining that women typically placed both their legs over the left side of the horse, so as they rode forward, the wind would pull open a blouse that opened to the right. “So some believe the placket (the fabric with the buttonholes) and buttons were swapped to ensure a woman riding sidesaddle on a horse didn’t have to worry about the wind blowing open her clothing,” he says. I feel like romance writers could really do a lot with this idea.
And then there’s Napoleon
If you prefer your history with a side of drama, Ossant offers another one of his favorite (if admittedly far-fetched) alternative theories: “Napoleon was alleged to have been enraged by women mocking his ‘right arm tucked in shirt’ look and ordered that women’s clothing was reversed so they could no longer mock him.”
Is this true? Probably not. Is it delightful? Absolutely.
Mass manufacturing locked it all in
Photo shows the interior of Loures Department Store, Paris, France.
BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES
Whatever the origins, the Industrial Revolution cemented these conventions permanently. When clothing shifted from bespoke to mass-produced in the late 19th century, factories needed clear, repeatable rules and 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, the die was cast—literally.
OK, fine, but why is clothing still like that?
The honest answer is habit … and also the remarkable human capacity to not notice something until it’s pointed out. (Guilty!) “We have kept the gendered closure system mostly because people are used to it,” Ossant says. “It’s something most people don’t notice until it’s flipped, and then they’re confused.”
Smith adds a practical component as well. “Retooling production lines costs money,” he explains, “and as long as the majority of consumers aren’t actively complaining, brands have little financial incentive to change.”
There’s also a brand-identity element, particularly in outerwear. “The placement of a zipper or a set of buttons is part of the garment’s signature,” Smith explains. “Think of iconic motorcycle jackets: The asymmetric off-center zip is as recognizable as any logo. Changing it would feel like altering the product’s DNA.”
Design schools further reinforce the tradition. Both experts confirm that button and zipper placement is taught as a technical standard in garment construction curricula. “Design schools teach the established gendered method for inserting zip closures or button-up fronts because this is now an established norm and what people expect,” says Ossant, who adds a personal anecdote. He owns a man’s shirt that accidentally had its button closure made the “wrong” way. “Every time I put it on, it proves a little difficult because we are so used to the standard way assigned to our genders,” he says. So if even a fashion professional with full knowledge of the convention trips up, the rest of us never had a chance.
Is one side easier than the other to button and zip?
Woman hands fastening button of silk blouse at home
ANTONIO GUILLEM/GETTY IMAGES
Yes, and this is the part where women discover they’ve been getting a raw deal their entire lives. Right-handed people will find men’s button placement more intuitive: The dominant right hand holds and guides the button, while the left hand holds the placket. For women’s clothing, that dynamic is reversed, meaning right-handed women are working slightly against their natural dexterity 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.” And, essentially, women’s clothing was optimized for a right-handed servant, not the right-handed woman wearing it.
Left-handed people get their own version of this frustration, and they tend to find women’s garments slightly more intuitive by the same logic. And with zippers, Smith notes, the direction of the zip track matters enormously for comfort and ease. “A stiff or awkwardly placed zip on a structured leather garment is genuinely frustrating to use, especially when the leather is new and hasn’t yet broken in.”
Meanwhile, right-handed women have simply adapted. “It’s just another annoying inconvenience women face in everyday life,” Ossant says, in what may be the most understated sentence ever written about fashion history. This particular quirk may not rise to the level of the famous pocket disparity in women’s clothing, but it’s very much in the same family.
Will this fashion quirk ever change?
Slowly, yes. Ossant predicts that “more clothing [will be] designed as unisex and serve the 90% dominant right-handed population.” Smith is similarly optimistic: “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 the category has been growing steadily across the industry. “As consumers become more vocal about wanting clothing that fits how they actually live rather than how tradition dictates, the industry will follow,” Smith says.
That said, don’t expect to go shopping this weekend and find everything magically flipped. The machines that make the garments are already built. The patterns are already standardized. Vintage clothing already enforces this standard. And a significant portion of the population has spent decades internalizing which way to reach. As Ossant candidly says: “Men have never and would never have been inconvenienced. Whereas right-handed women have had to put up with a lifetime of it being slightly inconvenient, followed by an era of having to get used to flipping.”
So my confusion when I grabbed my husband’s shirt is not some kind of adulting failure. It is the result of several centuries of servants, soldiers, industrial machinery and possibly one very petty Napoleon. But progress is coming. In the meantime, take comfort in the fact that you now have a genuinely interesting thing to say at parties.
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About the experts
John Smith is a fashion historian and the vice president of fashion design at Poshéle, where he specializes in garment construction, outerwear and the cultural history of fashion.
Robert Ossant is a fashion historian and the author of The Art of Couture Embroidery. He’s also a luxury fashion specialist who has been featured in Vogue, Marie Claire and other fashion magazines.
Why trust us
At Reader’s Digest, we’re committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including government and professional organizations and academic institutions as well as our writers’ personal experiences where appropriate. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.
Sources:
John Smith, fashion historian and vice president of fashion design at Poshéle; interviewed, June 5, 2026
Robert Ossant, fashion historian and author of The Art of Couture Embroidery; interviewed, June 5, 2026
Smithsonian Libraries and Archives: “The Up and Down History of the Zipper”
Retail Dive: “Consumers want gender-neutral retail clothing”
A tiny ingestible sensor can measure temperature from inside the body
A tiny ingestible sensor can measure temperature from inside the body
After being swallowed, the devices could offer continuous monitoring of patients who are sick or at risk of hypothermia.
Watch Video
Anne Trafton | MIT News
Publication Date: June 15, 2026
In a hospital or at home, temperatures are usually taken using an oral or forehead thermometer, but these do not always accurately reflect the core body temperature. Measuring core temperature from within the body could make it easier to determine whether someone is sick, and whether they’re at risk of spiking a dangerous fever.
To make it more feasible to obtain core body temperature measurements, MIT engineers have developed an ingestible sensor that can send continuous temperature updates from the GI tract.
The sensor is shaped like a tiny blueberry, 6 millimeters in diameter and 4 millimeters in height. That makes it much smaller than existing ingestible temperature sensors, which are more difficult to swallow and pose a potential risk of obstructing the GI tract.
“A sensor like this gives us the ability to monitor infections and identify them early,” says Giovanni Traverso, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. “That’s very relevant, particularly for at-risk populations like people who are immunosuppressed from chemotherapy treatments or immunosuppressive drugs.”
Video thumbnail Play video
Ingestible sensors could also enable more accurate temperature measurements for fertility tracking, and for monitoring people during anesthesia.
Traverso and Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT’s provost and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, are the senior authors of the new study. MIT postdoc Saransh Sharma is the lead author of the paper, which appears today in Nature Electronics.
Ingestible electronics
A handful of ingestible temperature sensors have become commercially available in recent years, but most are the size of a multivitamin or slightly larger, making them more challenging to swallow. Their size can also increase the risk of obstructing the GI tract.
Those capsules tend to be large due to the complex circuits they include, which require a great deal of power. That power is provided by relatively large, on-board batteries that make up much of the bulk of the capsule.
The MIT team wanted to design sensors that could measure temperature accurately, but at a much smaller size.
“The reason for them to be small is safety,” Traverso says. “We want something that is so small that the risk of any blockage or obstruction is highly mitigated, and also so that it can be easily ingested.”
To create a smaller device, the researchers set out to reduce the size of all of the main components — the temperature-sensing circuit, the antenna that relays temperature data, and the battery.
For the circuit, they created their own customized circuit that can fit onto a 1-square-millimeter silicon chip. To reduce the chip’s power consumption, the researchers designed an oscillator based on leakage current — the small current that flows through a circuit when it’s off. The frequency of this current varies depending on the temperature of the chip’s surroundings.
This circuit, which can detect temperature with an accuracy of 0.01 degrees Celsius, requires very little power — about 10 nanowatts. This means that it can be powered with a 1.55-volt coin cell battery, which is 4.8 millimeters in diameter and about 1.6 millimeter thick.
The new design further cuts energy consumption by using a communication strategy known as backscattering. This approach allows most of the power requirements to be outsourced to an external antenna that is located outside the body, within a foot or two of the sensor. The external antenna emits an ultra-high-frequency radio wave, which is then modulated by a tiny antenna within the sensor and sent back to the external antenna. By interpreting the changes in the radio wave, the external antenna can calculate the temperature value.
“We combined all of these different pieces together — the silicon chip, the battery, and the antenna — and we made it into an ingestible capsule, which is the smallest ingestible capsule that we have seen for temperature-sensing paradigms,” Sharma says.
The internal antenna sends out a temperature reading once every second, allowing for continuous monitoring of temperature.
Tiny thermometers
The researchers envision that this kind of sensor could be useful in several scenarios, including monitoring infection and observing patients during and after anesthesia. Anesthesia often disrupts the body’s normal temperature regulation mechanisms, which can put patients at risk of hypothermia.
This type of device could also be used at home, for monitoring fevers in children, or measuring core body temperature as a marker of ovulation, for fertility purposes. It could also be useful for monitoring athletes, soldiers, or anyone else who might be exposed to extreme temperatures.
To explore these possible uses, the researchers tested the sensors in animals while they were under anesthesia, and found that they could accurately detect and transmit temperature information. They also obtained accurate readings from animals that were awake and actively moving.
The researchers are now working on combining the temperature sensor with other sensors that could measure vital signs such as heart rate. They hope to begin testing these types of sensors in clinical trials within the next few years.
If proven effective for people in high-risk situations, Traverso believes such sensors could become widely used by anyone who needs to monitor their temperature.
“I think this could replace all thermometers, because it’s the most accurate way of taking temperature,” he says. “If we have miniature systems that can be easily swallowed and give very accurate data that’s superior to the current data, I think it can be helpful in so many ways.”
Other authors of the paper include Yubin Cai, Injoo Moon, Zhenming Yang, Peter Chai, Niora Fabian, Kailyn Schmidt, Alison Hayward, Andrew Pettinari, Maria Platero, Benedict Laidlaw, and Ashley Guevara.
The research was funded by the 711th Human Performance Wing, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), which notes that the views and conclusions contained in this article are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the United States government.
