Tender Buttons

Tired of plain brass blazer buttons? Thinking your jacket needs something from the closet of the late Duke of Windsor or 18th century France? Millicent Safro, proprietor of Manhattan's Tender Buttons on the upper East side, that being perhaps the only store in North America devoted entirely to buttons, has them.

I stopped by recently looking for silver buttons for that gray odd jacket to be based loosely on Cary Grant's in To Catch a Thief and was not disappointed. Catching my eye among her thousands of choices are buttons Safro commissions from one of New York's finest jewelers.

The store has other buttons of course, in corozo, mother of pearl, and horn as well materials ranging from paintings on ivory through Wedgewood to plastic Mickey Mouse buttons from the 1940s. But the enamelled metal are worth a detour all by themselves.