'Status Symbols: Identity and Belief in Modern Badges'

New exhibit in room 69a of the British Museum, up through next January 16.

Buttons (badges in British parlance) are a quintessentially 20th-century phenomenon.

The technological breakthrough that enabled them to be mass-marketed came in 1896 in the U.S., and soon thousands of small buttons were imported to Britain, bearing the old and young faces of Queen Victoria, in honor of her diamond jubilee a year later.

The show's curator, Amanda Gregory, talking to The Financial Times' Peter Aspden about badges and buttons, said, "They tell us about the subversive side of what a society is thinking."

Gregory says that ever since she organized the show, she can't help but notice what buttons people are wearing.

She says, "There seem to be a lot of cryptic slogans out there."

[via Peter Aspden and The Financial Times]