Button

Description

Button - a traditional silver ornament used to fasten and decorate the upper part of a women’s dress. The museum object consists of a circular decorative face and a hook attached to the reverse. The front part is made of silver of 500 fineness, while the hook is made of non-precious metal. The surface bears an embossed ornamental design. Prolonged use has caused abrasion to the silver surface, and individual elements of the relief decoration have become less distinct.
Buttons of this type were used in traditional Kazakh women’s clothing to fasten the upper part of a dress. Larger decorative objects of a similar form and function were also known as tana. The museum object served both as a functional fastener and as a decorative clothing ornament. The combination of an ornamented silver face and a hook made of non-precious metal shows that the decorative and functional components were produced from different materials.
The museum object is an ethnographic source illustrating traditional Kazakh women’s dress practices, the structure of decorative buttons, and 20th-century silverworking and clothing-decoration techniques.