The Bottom Button Rule Followed My Cardigan Home From My Blazer, Apparently

I buttoned a cardigan on a client three weeks ago exactly the way I’d button a blazer. Top hole first, working down, skip the bottom one on instinct, like my hands were on autopilot from twenty years of styling suits. She was standing in front of the mirror in a chunky open knit that had nothing structurally in common with a blazer, and I caught myself mid button and just stopped. Why was I doing that. Nobody taught me to do that to a cardigan. My hands did it because they’d done it to jackets a thousand times, and the rule packed its bags and moved into a completely different closet without my permission.

That’s the actual story here, not some tidy answer about whether you should or shouldn’t. The bottom button rule didn’t get debated and decided for cardigans. It just followed the blazer home, uninvited, and nobody checked whether the two garments were even built the same way underneath.

The Rule Was Never About the Button, It Was About the Break

The whole “always, sometimes, never” thing with jacket buttons traces back to tailoring, specifically to how a structured jacket is cut to break at the waist. A blazer has a dart. It has shoulder padding doing actual architectural work. It’s built with a suppressed waist and a peplum style flare below it, so when you leave that bottom button open, the jacket can do the one thing it was engineered to do, which is fall away from your body in a clean line instead of pulling tight across your hips. Button that bottom hole on a structured jacket and you fight the cut. The fabric puckers right where the waist dart meets the hip curve, because you’re asking woven fabric with zero stretch to bridge a gap it wasn’t cut to bridge.

A cardigan has none of that going on. It’s knit, not woven, which means it’s got give built into the fabric itself instead of relying on darts and seams to shape your body. There’s no peplum flare doing choreography below the waist. Most cardigans are cut straight or gently a lined, no structural break point for a button to protect or ruin. So the entire logic that makes the bottom button rule matter on a blazer, the dart, the break, the woven fabric with no stretch, just isn’t present. You’re applying a rule to a garment that doesn’t have the anatomy the rule was written for. That’s the actual mismatch, and it’s mechanical, not aesthetic.

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What Actually Happens When You Button the Bottom One

Here’s where I stop being theoretical and get out a tape measure, because that’s the only way I trust myself on this. I took a midweight ribbed cardigan I own, hem measuring nineteen inches straight across when it’s hanging open and unbothered. Buttoned every hole including the bottom one and sat down in it. The hem pulled to just under seventeen inches across the widest part of my hip, because ribbing wants to snap back to its resting width and sitting stretches you wider than standing. That two inch difference showed up as a set of horizontal pull lines radiating out from the bottom button, the exact thing that happens to a blazer when you button it wrong, except now it’s happening on a garment that had no reason to fail that way if I’d just left the last button alone.

Compare that to a longline cardigan with a lower button spaced closer to a side seam instead of sitting right at the hip’s widest point, and buttoning it barely changed the hem width at all, maybe half an inch. So the honest answer isn’t a universal rule, it’s a measurement question about where that last button actually sits on your specific cardigan and how much stretch the knit has left in it by the time it gets there. A cropped cardigan with a bottom button that lands above the waist behaves completely differently than one where it lands at the hip.

I had a client last month who’d been buttoning every single hole on a chunky knit because some article told her top open bottom closed was the sophisticated move, and she’d internalized it as gospel from the blazer world without anyone checking if it applied. She looked vacuum sealed at the waist in fabric that was never built to be sealed. The word everyone reaches for in that moment is flattering, and I’m not using it, because flattering for who, buttoned how, on which cut of cardigan, is a completely different conversation than the vague compliment that word usually stands in for.

So no, I’m not handing you a rule to replace the one you inherited. I’m telling you to check where your bottom button sits, sit down in the thing before you decide, and stop letting a blazer convention run your knitwear decisions just because your hands learned one lesson so well they forgot to ask if it still applied.