To plunge one’s hand into a deep glass jar of vintage buttons is to perform a quiet act of archaeology. In the dim, incense-scented corners of Kensington Market, these jars sit like small, sedimented monuments to a forgotten city. At Courage My Love, we have long harbored these glass vessels, filled to the brim with the discarded fasteners of the twentieth century. But to understand where they came from, one must look just east of our market borders, toward the wide, asphalt expanse of Spadina Avenue.\n\nFor decades, Spadina was the spine of Toronto’s garment industry—the \"shmatte\" trade. From the 1910s through the late 1970s, the brick lofts and warehouses between Front Street and College Street hummed with the mechanical chatter of thousands of sewing machines. It was a landscape defined by immigrant labor. Jewish, Ukrainian, Italian, and later Chinese needleworkers labored in these multi-story factories, transforming bolts of wool and cotton into the ready-to-wear uniforms of Canadian life. And at the center of this vast manufacturing ecosystem were the wholesale dry goods merchants and button jobbers.\n\nButtons were not mere closures; they were the punctuation marks of fashion. Before the dominance of cheap, injection-molded modern plastics, buttons were crafted from materials that carried weight, texture, and history.\n\nConsider the mother-of-pearl buttons that still settle at the bottom of our jars. Many of these began as freshwater mussel shells harvested from the Mississippi River basin or ocean-dwelling oysters from the South Pacific. They were blanked, drilled, and polished in factories that coated workers in a fine, pearlescent dust. On Spadina, wholesale merchants sold these by the gross to coat makers and shirtwaist manufacturers. In the hand, they feel cool, catching the light with a pale, oil-slick luster that modern polyester can never replicate.\n\nThen came Bakelite. Developed in the early twentieth century as the world’s first fully synthetic plastic, formaldehyde-polymerized phenol resin found an unexpected home in the fashion world. During the Great Depression and the war years of the 1940s, Bakelite buttons offered a cheap but vibrant escape from austerity. Carved in deep butterscotch, cherry red, and forest green, these buttons were heavy and substantial. When rubbed briskly against wool, they release a faint, medicinal scent of carbolic acid—a secret handshake for vintage collectors.\n\nWe also find molded glass buttons, many of them refugees from the post-war ruins of Bohemia. In the late 1940s, Czechoslovakian glassmakers, working from centuries-old cottage industry traditions, exported millions of tiny, pressed-glass masterpieces to North American distributors. These buttons, with their gold-gilt edges and hand-painted centers, treated the utilitarian act of fastening a coat as an opportunity for miniature art.\n\nAs the garment trade migrated overseas in the latter half of the twentieth century, the wholesale houses of Spadina quietly shuttered. Their remaining stock—the deadstock cards, the sample books, the loose bins of unsold inventory—was often swept into cardboard boxes and sold off for pennies. Much of it found its way into the basements and backrooms of Kensington Market, where the discarded remnants of industrial capitalism were transmuted into bohemian treasure.\n\nWhen you run your fingers through a button jar today, you are touching the physical remnants of Toronto’s working-class history. You are touching the choices of a factory supervisor who decided that a specific shade of green Bakelite would elevate a winter coat, or the labor of a home-sewer who carefully snipped these fasteners from a worn-out dress to save them for a rainy day. These jars are not just collections of haberdashery; they are the unwritten archives of Spadina Avenue, waiting to be sewn back into the fabric of the present.