Origins

Vevey in the nineteen-thirties was a town of modest commerce and immodest weather, and the shop at 14 Rue du Simplon dealt in instruments for measuring the latter. McWigglesworth & Fils, Baromètres — the Fils added in optimism the year the boy was born — sold used aneroid barometers to hoteliers, sanatorium directors and the occasional ship's chandler who had come a very long way from any ship.

Figgy II was not a bad man and not a good merchant. He bought on sentiment, priced on hope, and extended credit to anyone who admired the brass. His son's earliest memory, set down in 1979 for an interviewer he liked, was of forty-odd barometers on one wall, all indicating different pressures, and of understanding at the age of five that most of them were wrong and that nobody in the shop knew which.1

The mother, and the first lesson in grading

Ondine Vasilakou-McWigglesworth had a true and slightly smoky contralto and a career that never quite arrived: nine seasons in the second houses of Lyon, Basel and Trieste, one Carmen in Zagreb that the local paper called disconcertingly adult. She taught her son two things he cited for the rest of his life. The first was that an audience can hear the difference between the fourth-best and the best, pays accordingly, and cannot tell you why. The second was that a costume mistress in Trieste once held up a production for ninety minutes because a single jet-black shell button could not be matched, and that the fine fell on the singer.

She lost a week's fee over a button. I was eleven. I thought: that is a very expensive gap in the world's knowledge. — Recorded conversation, Villa Ambrosia, 1988

Collège Montcherand, and the hockey book

He was sent in 1944 to the Collège Montcherand above Yverdon, on a scholarship endowed for the sons of tradesmen, and was removed from it in the spring of 1947. The grounds, as the rector's letter puts it, were the operation of a market. The young McWigglesworth had been running a book on the inter-house hockey results — not a bookmaker's book, the rector conceded, but something stranger and more troubling: he was buying and selling the boys' claims on one another's future tuck rations, at prices that moved with the standings.

He had, in effect, invented a small futures exchange in confectionery, cleared it himself, and held a reserve against default in a locked drawer. The reserve was the thing the rector could not forgive. He was solvent, the letter complains, which the school was not.

1949: the barometer man is paid

Figgy II died in March 1949, aged fifty-two, of what the certificate calls cardiac insufficiency and his son always called the Vevey winter. The shop was sold to settle a debt to a rival dealer named Gressly. What remained, after Gressly, was:

• One biscuit tin, Huntley & Palmers, Reading, dented at the lid.
• Within it, approximately nine hundred buttons — horn, shell, brass, casein, jet, mother-of-pearl, one of silver — of no common provenance, accumulated over thirty years from the pockets of secondhand coats.
• Fourteen dollars and sixty cents, in four currencies, converted at the rate of the day on which the Estate's ledger opens.
• A note: These are worth something to someone. Find out who.

The eleven months

Between April 1949 and March 1950 he did almost nothing else. He took a room above a laundry, worked nights unloading crates at the Vevey goods yard, and spent the days sorting. Not by colour or by material, which is how buttons had always been sorted, but by the properties that determine whether one button can replace another: shank type, hole gauge, thread clearance, crown height, weight tolerance, and the behaviour of the edge against fine cloth.

He arrived at forty-one grades. The system was not elegant and he never claimed it was; it was, he said, what the buttons actually did. Thirty of the forty-one grades survive by their original numbers in the standard still licensed today.

1950–1952: the card index in Paris

In March 1950 he carried the index — eleven hundred cards in two shoeboxes — to Paris, and spent two years failing to be received by anyone. The houses had no department for a man like this. He was not a supplier, not a buyer, not press. He was offering a vocabulary, and the industry did not yet know it was short of one.

What turned it was not a sale but a crisis. In September 1952 the house of Caubère lost a nine-piece collection ten days before showing: a Lyonnais supplier had delivered buttons that were, by eye, identical to the samples and, by thread clearance, four tenths of a millimetre tighter. Every buttonhole in the collection had been worked to the sample. The house faced remaking ninety-six buttonholes by hand.

McWigglesworth, by then known to the workroom if not to the first floor, was summoned by an première d'atelier named Hélène Vautrin, read the clearance in under a minute, named four Parisian stockists holding buttons that would serve, and had the correct article at the Rue Cambon by the following afternoon. He charged nothing for the visit and a great deal for the licence.

The McWigglesworth Fastening Standard was registered in Geneva on 4 November 1952. He was twenty-one years old and had, for the first time in his life, an income that did not require him to lift anything. Plate II takes up what he did with it.