It's because gentry had servants button women into their clothes.

We leave the last button undone on a suit to make a dead rich person not feel as bad about being obese.

A tie is a type of napkin.

The small pocket on some pants is for a pocket watch.

Flowers at formal events were because of body odor.

Shirt collars are for wind protection when lighting a cigarette.

Two different buttons on the sleeves of long sleeve shirts or jackets are for watches.

The hoop on some pants are for a hammer.

There's a lot of things made due to tradition and never updated.

I want my clothes to be put together with dovetail joints. Who do I go to for that?

Ladies had a maid, men buttoned themselves.

I'd like to point out that it makes undressing a person of the opposite button-direction easier. Because they're facing you but your finger muscles are trained from undressing yourself. So just maybe all the stuff about servants is bowdlerizing the real purpose. Nobody was helping lowerclass women, and rich men had valets.

The article gives two explanations: women had servants to help them get dressed and men didn't, and men had to be able to draw a sword from their right hip without it getting stuck in clothes.

I find neither explanation very convincing.

It wasn't universally true that women had servants and men didn't. That may have been true for a specific time and social class, but poor women definitely didn't have servants; they were the servants. And kings and high nobles did have servants to help them get dressed. Sometimes it was an entire formal ritual.

Does being right handed matter? I'm left-handed, and I have no problem buttoning my shirt. It's really more a matter of what you're used to than which hand is dominant.

I find sword drawing slightly more convincing, at least if you look at the military uniforms of 200 years ago. Sables were still common, at least among officers and cavalry. And those uniforms definitely had buttons.

But then why would women have the opposite?

I noticed this with one of my kids shirts. The buttons are backwards for easy dressing. Doesn't explain half my zip hoodies which are the wrong way round however.

My mom always loved this because she’s left-handed

I was told the reason is so that men can better undress their female partners. Which is of course problematic, but I think a better explanation than "men dressed themselves, women didn't".

IIRC it all falls back to a time when men's and women's clothes were made and tailored by totally different groups of people, each of which established their own conventions and measurements, and nobody's been smart enough to change it to make sense in the last 2 centuries.

For a fun addition, because a lot of work clothes are unisex, women of today can get the fun experience of "which side are the fucking buttons on‽"

The explanation I heard was that when seated at the table as traditional table partners, the woman should be to the right of the man. Having opposite button placement means you cannot look into the gaps between the buttons and accidentally get a glimpse of your partner's chest.

so it's easier for a man to undress a woman but more difficult for a man to undress a man, right?

/s

Corner Gas had a whole episode where this was the punchline