Without looking, can you say whether your shirts button to the left or to the right? The answer is actually pretty simple: If you wear women’s clothing, the buttons are on the left side of the shirt. However, if you wear men’s shirts, the buttons line up on the right.
“This is not a big thing, but it is a weird thing,” says the Atlantic. “The Button Differential is a relic of an old tradition that we have ported, rather unthinkingly, into the contemporary world.”
Nobody knows for sure why this left and right format persists today, but the most popular theory is that it might have to do with how middle- and upper-class European women used to dress. During the Renaissance and the Victorian Era, women’s clothing was often much more complicated and elaborate than men’s - think petticoats, corsets and bustles - and therefore more difficult for the wearer to secure themselves.
So, to make it easier for servants (right-handed ones, that is) to button up their employers’ dresses, clothiers might have started sewing buttons on the opposite side. Men’s shirts, meanwhile, were designed for wearers to button on their own. Eventually, as mass-produced clothing became more and more common, the design became standard.
Meanwhile, another very similar theory addresses the opposite side of this conundrum: Why would men’s clothes always button on the right? That particular tradition might have been “a holdover from warfare". Just as wealthy women once needed servants to help them get dressed, men once required clothing that helped them perform in battle.
Whatever, the historic truth may be, a better question may be: Why has this tradition carried into the modern era, when women (and men) can dress themselves, thank you very much?