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Home > Focus On
Two centuries of Italian buttons
Rome - (Ign) - They began in the 17th century, working oxen's nails, buffalo bones, pieces of horn or hardwood; they formed small discs, which they then coloured or finely carved, to make them into buttons of great quality, originally for use by the tailors of Milan and the Veneto region. Then they began to sell them in the rest of northern Italy, and at the beginning of the 19th century, also in France and Germany. By the early 20th century they were the world's largest industrial centre of button production, a success due above all to companies based in the valleys between Bergamo and Brescia, in Lombardy. This specialist production today sees Italy occupying a position of undisputed world leadership.
This is not a unique case, and is in fact quite frequent in Italian economic history: that of a circumscribed area in which particular skills, expertise and productive imagination have taken root over decades or centuries, culminating in the projection of dozens of small businesses onto the world economic stage thanks to intelligent specialisation and high product quality. The so-called "Button Valley", the Italian industrial district of Val Calepio
(www.buttonland.it), is a textbook example. The official date of birth of the Italian button industry, emerging from an craft tradition which had been active for centuries, was in 1957, when Edoardo Tacchini set up in Palazzolo sull'Oglio his company Tacchini & Fanti, the first real European factory for the mass production of buttons. Back then, the raw material used was corozo, an absolute innovation for the time, a dense albumen extracted from the seeds of an American palm tree, which during baking could be given any colour and, once cool, became extremely hard and could be worked like stone. Tacchini & Fanti became SAMB and eventually today's Lanfranchi , one of the world's leaders in the sector of zips, the great-grandchildren of Mr Tacchini's buttons.
Around this first business nucleus, in the course of over a century an extremely dynamic business fabric has been built up, with 150 small and medium-sized businesses, accounting for 2000 jobs and an overall turnover of around € 250 million, representing around two thirds of the entire Italian production in the sector. On an international scale, the Italian button industry today occupies a position of solid leadership, with a share of around 20% of the total of world exports and an overall turnover of around € 400 million per year, over 50% of which is realised on foreign markets. If we consider that the Italian industry of clothing and fashion, which absorbs most of the button industry's production, in turn exports two thirds of its products, we can estimate that around 80% of Italian buttons end up abroad, either directly or indirectly, thus taking the Italian world market share to around 40%.
This is a difficult record to match, whose achievement and maintenance have required significant research efforts, not only in terms of style, but also of products and quality. From buttons made in corozo, we saw the introduction of those in plastic and then new synthetic amorphous materials, able to undergo any heat treatment or washing, as long as the surface pigments have the same characteristics. This led to the birth of other companies around button manufacturers, in the sectors of plastics, pigments, and the surface treatment of materials. These related industries probably account for at least another € 100 million in turnover, and result in technological consequences which go far beyond the albeit vast universe of fashion.
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