A boot button hook or button hook is a metal hook on a handle with a grip, which was used to pull buttons, usually on boots or gloves, more easily through the corresponding buttonholes.[1]Boot buttons were particularly popular in the Victorian era, when fashion dictated that women should wear buttoned boots made of stiffleather. They were usually about the size of a fork, but could be much smaller or larger, depending on whether they were for buttons on collars, gloves, corsets or boots. Between 1880 and the First World War, boot buttons were an item that could be found in practically every household. Today they have become collector's items; there is a Buttonhook Society dedicated to collecting and displaying boot buttons.
Early 20th-century buttonhook advertising a shoe shop in MichiganA buttonhook in use on a c. 1900 boot
Buttonhooks on display at Bedford Museum & Art Gallery
^Mary Brooks Picken: A Dictionary of Costume and Fashion: Historic and Modern. Dover Publications, Mineola 1999, S. 41; Valerie Cumming, C. W. Cunnington, P. E. Cunnington: The Dictionary of Fashion History. Berg, Oxford/New York 2010, S. 36.
^Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office. United States. Patent Office. 1910.
![Pocket knives with buttonhooks [2]](File:PocketKnifeButtonHooks.JPG)
