Will Lasry shows how Italian tailors hand-sew shirt buttons using a folded placket method marked with a pen. Hand-sewn buttons stay slightly loose and move with your body, while machine-sewn ones are stiff and rigid.
So right now she's sewing the button by hand. This is done with a needle and a thread, the old school, the traditional way. So she's using the pen to label where all the buttons are going to be sewn. What she just did is she folded both plackets together. So now she knows that the middle of the buttonholes, which is now going to be on the other pocket, is exactly where the button should go. So you'll see here both plackets are together, and then she takes the pen and she goes in the middle of each buttonhole. On the other side of that buttonhole is the other placket. That mark indicates exactly where the button should go. It's in the middle of the buttonhole. And now she's sewing the button with a machine. When you make the buttons on the buttonhole machine, what happens is it's actually much stiffer. When you're using it by hand, it's a little bit more loose, it has a bit more movement, it's more natural, it shapes to your body better. When you're wearing something by hand, it molds to your body, and that's what they specialize in over here.
