Vest Buttoning: Going All the Way?

[rip]

When did it become fashionable to leave the bottom button undone on a vest?

In watching a couple of films from the 1940s recently, I notice the men had their vests buttoned all the way down. Edward Arnold and Edward G. Robinson in "Unholy Partners" and Clark Gable and Adolph Menjou in "The Hucksters", all showing fully-buttoned vests with their 3-piece suits.

[manton]

EDIT: never mind

[whittaker]

To quote G. Bruce Boyer:

With a six-button front, the bottom button is usually left undone (the English tailors call it an "idle" button). Supposedly this practice began when the British king Edward VII grew too large a stomach to close the last button, and other gentlemen of his company slavishly followed the example, whether out of courtesy or because Edward was such a style setter they thought it an appealing touch. Whatever the impetus, the fashion caught on quickly, and leaving the bottom button idle is still considered de rigueur for fastidious dressers. In The Road To Wigan Pier (1937), George Orwell, rather sneeringly I'm afraid, reminded his readers of the English class-consciousness of such idiosyncrasies of dress: Comrade X, it so happens, is an old Etonian. He would be ready to die on the barricades, in theory anyway, but you notice that he still leaves his bottom waistcoat button undone.

So, one imagines that the tradition begun in the early 1900's.

[BirdofSydney]

Sir, my understanding is that on an "English" vest, (though perhaps not an Italian, or even many made by American tailors), the bottom button actually cannot be fastened. It sits along the curve a little, as does the buttonhole. I presume this style followed the custom to which Mr. Whittaker refers.

That said, I've not had the pleasure yet of owing such a garment.

Best,

Eden

[TVD]

My Savile Row waistcoats have six buttons, the last cannot be fastened. My old Central European ones had five, all could be fastened, yeat the bottom one was always left undone.

You need to compare this to a 3B SB coat. Usually, only the middle button is fastened, sometimes the top two. To fasten all three would look uptight and formal. Equally, with a waistcoat, one strives to achieve a certain degage look, and leaves the last button undone.

[rip]

My Savile Row waistcoats have six buttons, the last cannot be fastened. My old Central European ones had five, all could be fastened, yeat the bottom one was always left undone.

You need to compare this to a 3B SB coat. Usually, only the middle button is fastened, sometimes the top two. To fasten all three would look uptight and formal. Equally, with a waistcoat, one strives to achieve a certain degage look, and leaves the last button undone.

Actually, the point of the original post was that this "degage" look apparently didn't make it to those paradigms of proper dress in the US: the film stars, until after the late 1940s, regardless of its venerable history and provenance. I would have thought that such epitomal dressers as Adolph Menjou and Edward Arnold would have been properly attired by the costumers and/or art directors of their films, yet there they were, in all their sartorial splendor, with fully (6 buttons) buttoned waistcoats (vests). As has been frequently said in my beloved Flatbush, "Go figure."

[manton]

I've seen a lot of photos and films in which American stars either left their sixth button undone, or wore a Savile Row style vest with an idle button. So there was at least a mix of both styles back then.

[Anglo Saxon]

An alternative view:

“As a matter of fact, this little deliberate omission on the part of the well dressed man, although a fashion now and a habit clung to closely, is in reality the unconscious concealment of a defect. Men’s waistcoats have for years been made too long: the result being that if one keeps the bottom button fastened the waistcoat “rucks up” and looks dreadful. So one undoes it, gives it a pull downwards, and all is well.
Waistcoats are now, however, beginning to be made shorter, so that there will be no longer any need for this idiosyncrasy of dress, and it will probably soon disappear”. (!)

(The original) Clothes and the Man by G.F. Curtis, 1926.