THE BUTTON GI

Can I touch it?

Please don’t.  The stand may tip because the buttons are extremely heavy.

How many buttons are there?

I have absolutely no idea.  I have no intention of counting the buttons. The gi itself (button-covered) weighs about 10kg.

How long did it take?

I don’t work on large projects like this in a steady or linear manner, but the project itself took hundreds of hours.  I started putting buttons on this gi sometime in early 2023.  It was finished in January of 2025.

What Gi is this?

This is one of Scramble’s original Scramble Kid gis.  It’s unfortunately discontinued, but it was my favourite training gi.

Did you have a plan? 

I consistently made plans for the gi, but I couldn’t really stick to any of them because I was constrained by the buttons that I could find secondhand.  Part of the fun of the project was watching the plan change and evolve based on colour availability.  Did you know that finding vintage/secondhand orange buttons is quite rare?  I did not, but now I do, and you do too! Go forth and conquer. 

Why did you do this? 

I found a jar of mixed, vintage buttons in a charity shop.  I’ve always had visions of upcycling old gis, but I’m not sure why I decided to cover one entirely in buttons.  Vibes, I guess, and the presence of a jar of buttons that I couldn’t walk away from.  

As I hoarded little broken bits of jewelry, yogurt tops, and buttons I found on the ground in small jars like a confused dragon, I realised the process was a good metaphor for learning jiu jitsu– my entire jiu jitsu game is full of things I’ve gotten secondhand.  Sewing the bits onto the gi was a painstaking, annoying, and often physically painful process, not unlike the process of integrating new technique into your jiu jitsu game.  

There were buttons that were easy to sew, and there were buttons that were difficult– some aren’t sewn at all, but are glued on (an excellent metaphor for my triangle technique).  There were areas that took me no time at all to complete, and then there were spaces that took months to fill because of how fiddly, annoying, and painful they were to work in.  The shoulders, for instance, were extremely difficult to fill because of the way the fabric falls, but the skirts of the gi were much nicer to sew.  

Anyway, once I started I had to finish.

Where did the buttons come from?

The original lot of buttons came in a giant jar from a charity shop.  Once I ran out of those buttons, I started collecting them from everywhere (and I got quite loose with the definition of “button”– “button” quickly came to mean “anything I can sew on that stupid gi”).  Vinted, charity shops, and Ebay were the best places to find job lots of buttons and broken jewelry if you’re so inclined.  

One of the constraints I gave myself when designing and creating the Button Gi was that I wasn’t going to buy anything new specifically for the gi– all the bits on the gi were found secondhand or were things I already had around. There are, as a result, a number of things I found in the street sewn onto this gi.  Do you have any idea how many things it takes to cover a gi in things? It’s a lot of things.  I found some of the things on the street. 

How did you stick them to the gi?

Most of the objects stuck to the gi are sewn on by hand.  Those that couldn’t be sewn are glued.

If you want to see internal construction let me know and I’ll show you. I’m including this part because everyone who saw this gi when it was displayed in my house asked to see inside.