Where have I seen her before? In March, South Korean model HoYeon Jung opened the runway for Louis Vuitton’s women’s collection wearing a skirt and bodysuit that featured oversized zippers. According to Nicolas Ghesquière, after the show, they were the largest ever made and the process of enlarging and exaggerating this element led him to also change the size of other garments and details. Basically, he created the brand’s summer 2023 collection out of zippers.
A jump in time – but not on stage – takes us to the parade of the French brand’s summer 2024 collection. Giant zippers are no longer visible on the garments, but it was a dizzying zipper that captured all the photos from this presentation: that of actress Zendaya in a stunning white dress. The result was so impressive that the image made the rounds on social media: “Zendaya’s zip-up dress in 2023 is Liz Hurley’s must-see dress in 1994,” X read, alluding to the outfit (Versace’s) that the Imagine changing red carpet fashion forever.
Zendaya arrives at the Louis Vuitton show.Getty
Today’s Vuitton zippers are a nostalgic element that comes from one of Ghesquière’s first collections, which was at the forefront of the French brand’s creative direction a decade ago, and is now reinterpreted in a new size. Its impact has resonated: Although we might think that the two-mile invasion has already reached its peak in fashion trends, the fall/winter 2023-2024 collections show that this trend was waiting to happen. Exposed zippers appear in the collections of Eckhaus Latta or Sukeina and have their roots in the creations of Ghesquière from the ’10s, but also in other brands such as Marni, which proposed the look in 2010 with a series of shift dresses and blouses with exposed zippers , which the fashion world couldn’t get enough of, or the dresses with zips in the back that made Victoria Beckham her reputation as a fashion designer in 2011. An article on celebrity Hollywood stylist Rachel Zoe’s style page confirms her return: “The exposed zipper is everywhere,” she says.
Louis Vuitton Spring/Summer 2023.Peter White (Getty Images)
Brief history of the zipper
In reality, the humble zipper’s road to success was a long one. This mechanical marvel was created thanks to the work of several inventors, although, as invention expert Mery Bellis tells us on the outreach website thinkco.com, none of them were able to convince the general public to accept it as part of everyday life. It was magazines and the fashion industry that made the new zipper the popular item it is today.
The story, Bellis tells us, begins with Elias Howe Jr. (1819-1867), inventor of the sewing machine, receiving a patent in 1851 for a “continuous and automatic garment sewer.” However, perhaps due to the success of his other major invention, he left his prototype zipper behind. It took nearly half a century for anyone to reconsider Howe’s idea. It was a Chicago inventor named Whitcomb Judson who, in 1893, introduced a device for fastening shoes that he called a “closure fastener.” But it was a complicated finish. Finally, in December 1913, a Swedish engineer living in Philadelphia named Gideon Sundback came up with the idea of the modern zipper. Sundback increased the number of fasteners in two opposing rows of teeth and managed to connect them with a sliding piece. His “separable closure” was patented in 1917.
Sundback also developed the machine to produce this new zipper. But the English name “zipper” was not his idea, but that of the BF Goodrich Company, a company that decided to add this closure to its new rubber boots: the sound it made when closing, “zzzzzip,” gave the zipper finally his name.
In the early years, zippers were used to close rubber boots and tobacco bags. It took almost two decades for the fashion industry to be convinced that this novel fastener had sensational potential. In the 1930s, a campaign for children’s clothing with zippers began to encourage independence in young children, as zippers allowed them to dress themselves without much assistance. A nod to surrealism, designer Elsa Schiaparelli was the first to incorporate zippers into her avant-garde dresses, ensuring they became more popular in women’s clothing, but her fashion was still more conceptual than everyday wear.
The zipper in the fashion conversation
In 1937, the American magazine Esquire launched a survey of its readers, which it called “the battle for the fly,” asking whether the button fly or the zipper fly was better. The second won with the memorable claim that the first had “the possibility of an involuntary and embarrassing disorder.” The truth is that no such article appears in the magazine’s online archive (which covers all articles since 1933), but this anecdote has been repeated in numerous publications, including Esquire magazine itself in 2014. It seems likely that the History of “the battle of “the fly” reuses a sentence from the book Zipper: An Exploration in Novel (1994) by Robert Friedel, which discusses the marketing efforts of Talon, the BF Goodrich Company’s competitor. What Esquire has is an interesting article by John Berendt from May 1, 1989 about the zipper, which states: “Zippers were still a novelty in 1932 (…) they were a symbol of the mechanical future and the dehumanization that awaited us .” all of us (…). Custom tailors despised zipper flys as vulgar, and mass producers claimed they were too expensive: a zipper added a dollar to the price of a pair of pants; The buttons only cost two cents. It stayed that way until 1934, when the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York and his second cousin Dickie Mountbatten suddenly started wearing zip-up trousers. According to the American Smithsonian Museum, the zipper was declared a “new idea in men’s tailoring.”
Be that as it may, the zipper ultimately impressed with its practicality. They were incorporated into the uniforms of American sailors and as fashion began to suggest less and less formal clothing, the zipper gained popularity. Until World War II, zippers were widespread in Europe and North America, and after the war they spread to the rest of the world. The first urban garment to incorporate it was the leather jacket, and in the 1950s NASA began producing spacesuits with zippers that could maintain air pressure in the vacuum of space. They were used by astronauts during the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969, the first moon landing.
The zipper became increasingly popular on leather jackets.Keystone Features (Getty Images)
Today it could be said that the zipper is an extremely practical invention, but its history is at times marked by controversy. In the 20s and 30s of the last century, they were frowned upon, especially in women’s clothing, as they made it easier to undress and thus promoted sexual activity. In fact, the musical director Busby Berkeley exploited the suggestive and seductively promiscuous possibilities of the zipper by presenting one of women in the film Footlight Parade, thereby consolidating the erotic component later associated with zippers and which Madonna exploits so well would become her corset made by Jean Paul Gaultier for her Blonde Ambition Tour in 1990. Back to the origins: in the 1940s, thanks to masters like Cristóbal Balenciaga, zippers were moved from the front or sides of clothing to the back, and the zipper became a common resource for subsequent closures, strangely always exclusively in the case of women.
Madonna during her “Ambition Tour”.Gie Knaeps (Getty Images)
A recent review of this pattern calls into question why. Aesthetic reasons can be cited (after all, this type of closure on the back allows the garment to have an uninterrupted front, which is particularly interesting in thin or tight fabrics), but another possible reading is that there are zippers on the back only in women’s clothing, for example, imagine the woman who goes from her parents’ house to her husband’s house and needs help getting dressed and undressed. In an interesting reflection on this topic on the women’s self-publishing website Swaay, journalist Celeste Headlee, author of Heard Mentality, We Need To Talk: How To Have Conversations That Matter, connects women’s freedoms to clothing For her, the zipper in the back might be a patriarchal reflection of how women should dress: “Why, why is it in the back anyway?” There are four sides of my body and three of them are absolutely perfect for zipping up see to grip it well and close it. Why then? Why, in the name of all that is sacred, do clothing manufacturers insist on putting the zipper on a side of my body that I can’t see or reach without practicing extreme yoga? For me this is a feminist issue. If we go back in history, it becomes clear that women continued to be disadvantaged and needed help to carry out the usual tasks of life,” and continues: “Do men have zippers and buttons on the back of their clothes?” There is a single one Men’s clothing item that has a zipper at the back? NO! It’s just the women whose clothes need help putting on. “It is a remnant of age-old discrimination against single women and a punishment for those who try to live independently.”
A Victoria Beckham design seen on the runway in 2011. WWD (Penske Media via Getty Images)
To this day, there are gender differences when it comes to attaching zippers to clothing. While in women’s fashion they are usually closed with the left hand, in men’s fashion this is done with the right. This stems from a legacy before the zipper, when buttons were intended for women to fasten clothing to.
The zipper has also found its way into pop culture. Marlon Brando (Wild, 1953) and James Dean (Rebel Without a Cause, 1955) created the image of the tough and rugged mid-century man thanks to a biker jacket decorated with zippers.
Two decades later, the zipper stirred up dust again. In 1971, the Rolling Stones released their legendary album Sticky Fingers with a cover designed by none other than Andy Warhol. The original idea, photographed by Warhol’s art collective The Factory, featured a close-up of the fly of a man (supposedly Mick Jagger) dressed in very tight, revealing jeans with the zipper down. However, producing the cover was very time-consuming and the vinyl was damaged, so ultimately only the packaging photo remained. The image was a scandal: in Spain the album was censored for obscenity, leading to an alternative cover being designed showing the fingers of a woman’s hand emerging from a can of molasses, a somewhat eerie image. That was only marketed in our country.
The cover of “Sticky Fingers” by the Rolling Stones.
Why does (almost) everything say YKK?
Look at a zipper on the clothes you’re wearing, on your pants, on your jacket, or on your bag: it says YKK, right? The fact that we guessed these three engraved letters is not magic, but pure statistics. The acronym means “Yoshida Kogyo Kabushikikaisha” and can be translated from Japanese as “Yoshida Limited Company”. It is the name of the company founded in 1934 by the Japanese manufacturer Tadao Yoshida, which today produces more than two million kilometers of zippers every year, i.e. 50% of the world’s zippers: around 7,000 million pieces.
Almost two centuries after the original zipper, the popularity of their invention measures absolute ubiquity.