Right on the button badges – in pictures | Life and style

Christen Carter, founder of Busy Beaver Button Company in Chicago, got into pin badges when she was 12. “It was the first thing I could buy with my own babysitting money.” They became a career in the 1990s when she worked in London during her college years. She founded the Busy Beaver Button Museum 10 years ago. “Buttons reflect a history of commercial printing, personal values and social movements. There’s no other ephemera that tells a people’s history like this.” Her book Button Power: 125 Years of Saying It With Buttons is published next month by Princeton Architectural Press