Whimsical costume designer defined Broadway characters

Jeanne Button, who was consigned by her parents to taking sewing courses in college that led to an expedient degree in home economics, but who finessed what might have been a humdrum job into a glamorous career as a Broadway costume designer, died May 8 in New York. She was 86.

The cause was lung cancer, her son, the actor Raphael Sbarge, said.

If Mark Twain was right that clothes make the man, then Button helped define hundreds of characters in Broadway and off-Broadway plays, operas and films.

In 1967, she won an award from the American Theater Wing (originally called the Joseph Maraham Foundation Award, later the Wing’s Hewes Design Award) for the Broadway production of “MacBird!,” a Shakespearean spoof about the Kennedy 
assassination in which the Lyndon B. Johnson character was decked out in a chest protector and catcher’s mitt, and John F. Kennedy was inaugurated wearing a laurel wreath and trailing black robes.

Button compiled the monumental multivolume “A History of Costume in Slides, Notes, and Commentaries,” a 450-page text accompanied by sketches and 1,500 color photographs by her son. Completed in the early 1990s, it traced the evolution of men’s and women’s clothing over 5,000 years, since ancient Egypt.

Deborah Bell, who teaches costume design at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, wrote in an email that Button had “understood the practical considerations of costume technology and had a reputation among costume studios as an ideal collaborator — someone who could integrate the visual expectations of the directors, fellow set and lighting designers, and performers as well as the needs of the costume technicians.”

Reviewers for The New York Times praised her “neatly evocative” costumes for “Now Is the Time for All Good Men,” a 1967 off-Broadway musical, and said her ensembles for the Juilliard American Opera Center’s 1971 production of “The Losers,” an opera about a motorcycle gang by that name, “must have sent a thrill of desire into anybody who ever wanted to go vroom.”

Reviewing the American Shakespeare Festival’s version of “Henry V” at Stratford, Connecticut, in 1969, The Boston Globe singled out Button’s “marvelous” costumes for the prelates, who “waddle on stage like swollen nightmares imagined by Walt Disney,” including one “encased in a huge, hoop-skirted glossy red cassock set with yellow buttons running from his neck to his feet in gradually increased size.”

In 2012, The Broad Street Review declared that in the Pennsylvania Opera’s production of “Peter Pan,” Button “met the challenge of widely divergent yet singular costume designs for an extraordinary cast of characters.”

Among the other Broadway productions she designed for were “The Robber Bridegroom” (1976), “Wings” (1979) and “The Dresser” (1981). Her film credits include “La Bohème” (1988) and National Lampoon’s “Disco Beaver From Outer Space” (1978).

Button was born on May 8, 1930, in Cincinnati, the daughter of Carroll Clarence Button, who worked for a dairy, and the former Marjorie Ault, a school dietitian.

Even though she was on track for a degree in home economics, which her parents had urged her to get — and which she earned at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) — she longed to be an actress.

When she realized that her true calling was design, she taught herself to draw and won a scholarship to the Yale School of Drama.

Button’s marriage to Stephen Sbarge, a playwright she met at Yale, ended in divorce. In 1981, she married McDonald Eaton, a production designer and painter. He died in 2013. In her private life, she was known as Mrs. Button-Eaton.