Buttons for Black Friday

I tried on my friend's new coat (shown in the photo and purchased at a crazy awesome discount)this evening and it looked kinda all right on me, though much better on him. And then I noticed it was really hard to fasten the buttons. He said, "the buttons on men's clothes are always on the right" when I couldn't maneuver my right hand to fit button in its hole. It's quite a nice coat: heavy wool, added insulation in the lining, long enough to repel a harsh New England wind and attractive without being fop-ish. After further admiration of his new warm garment, I wondered why my clothes always had buttons on the left side and, ergo, just *why* the "button placement disparity" (BPD for short) exists between men's and women's clothes.

I just ran over to my closet to check the buttons on my coat. My theory persists.
Then I ran a search through Google and found a plethora of answers. First, the presiding argument is that the right side versus left side exists merely to distiguish a men's shirt from one styled to fit a female figure. Secondly, the difference in the placement of buttons (if there are any) isn't a given trait -- just most of the time. Third, there are conflicting theories for the origins of the difference in how men and women put on clothes.

One authoritative site, which specializes in the history of costume from Medieval through 19th Century Europe had a few explanations:
-A dominant theory is that men most often dressed themselves while women were dressed with the help of a maid. For the sake of her servant, the buttons were inverted. This may carry some clout, but given that the vast majority of women in these eras were lower-class citizens it is more the trends set by the ruling class that dictate fashion.
-Another argument was that buttons were on the left for women to remind them of their social inferiority to men. It seems to be formed with the idea that the women who set fashion trends dressed themselves without a maid, which does away with the first theory
-Third, buttons were a rare commodity on women's clothes until (roughly) the 1830's, in which they seemed to be evenly distributed between sides.

Therefore, the placement of buttons seems rather ambiguous up to the late 19th century, or around the time of the Industrial Revolution. Imagine that. The final theory in this conundrum states that the advent of the sewing machine and ready-to-wear clothing made it necessary for standards in differentiating men's garments from women's. In the age of the Bloomer costume, it became evident the women could wear freer "men's" clothes just as well as their male counterparts. Clothing companies, therefore, had to compensate for the gradually shrinking difference between men's and women's clothes with button placement.

Got it? Good. Now put on your coat before go out tonight, it's cold out there!