circa 1952-1953, black beaded matador style jacket with satin shawl collar and cuffed sleeves, interior name tag label "Ice Capades/ Costume Studio Inc./ Beverly Hills, Calif./ Name/Year/ Measurements" with ink inscription, "Dick Button/1953", matching beaded trousers with white suspenders, satin lining, jacket 18 in. length, trousers, 49 in. length; together with beaded black jacket with wide plain lapels, interior label for "Sills/Cambridge", 21 in. length

I wore a white mess jacket at the 1947 World Championships in Stockholm (and then again at the 1952 Olympics in Oslo), marking a bold change in the black outfits traditionally worn by male skaters. I wore white because I knew this was the first World Championship after World War II during a time when there were helmets still on the streets of Vienna and Prague. With little money for lighting the huge outdoor Olympiastadion in Stockholm, I felt it was necessary to be seen in the dark space and so I wore the white mess jacket. The newspapers howled, “Who does he think he is, a waiter?” The following year, multiple skaters wore white mess jackets but at the 1948 Winter Olympics the background was snow and the event was in the afternoon. So I wore black. It was all a matter of what the scene set. This beaded mess jacket was made for me to wear in the Ice Capades in 1952 as a reference to that first white jacket, which had no beads and a plain, notched collar. This was also my first year in professional figure skating, which was the shortest one on record because it was during my first year at law school.