Zip! I was reading Schopenhauer last night,
Zip! And I think that Schopenhauer was right …
Zip! I’m an intellectual.
—Lorenz Hart: “Zip!” from Pal Joey
The zipper is probably the only clothes fastener ever to have been the star of a Broadway show tune. When Pal Joey’s highbrow striptease artist, based on Gypsy Rose Lee, shed bits of her spangled costume, she demonstrated the zipper’s amazing properties, of which the most remarkable is speed.
The zipper revolutionized not only dressing, but undressing—and in the process changed relations between the sexes. For centuries, getting your clothes off and on was a slow and often an awkward process, and one that you could not always manage on your own. It was also precarious: hooks came undone, drawstrings and laces knotted or broke, pins made holes in you and in the fabric, buttons popped, and buttonholes tore.
For years getting dressed took most middle- and upper-class people a long time, while getting undressed could take so long that it might be dangerous. In the Middle Ages knights sometimes bled to death on the battlefield before they could be unbuckled and unhooked from their tin-can armor. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a lady’s formal gown might have twenty or thirty buttons, and underneath these gowns fashionable women were often laced into corsets that made it impossible for them to take a deep breath. They sometimes fainted from exertion, and might even suffer permanent damage before they were freed.
The creation of the zipper was a slow process. The original “clasp locker” exhibited by Whitcomb L. Judson at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago was clumsy and bulky. Many inventors, some of them women, worked to improve it. Finally, in 1917, Gideon Sundback patented the device we know today. In World War I, his “hookless fasteners” appeared on life-vests and flying suits for the Army and Navy; and B. F. Goodrich, who gave the device its name, put it on galoshes in the 1920s. But it wasn’t until the mid-1930s that zippers were light and flexible enough to be used on fashionable clothing.
At first these zippers, always of metal, were usually concealed by flaps of fabric, though they were occasionally visible on military uniforms in World War II. But it was not until the 1960s that they really came out into the open. Suddenly bright-colored, often supersized zippers began to run up the front of stiff synthetic or cotton pique mini-dresses, and matching shiny boots, making women look as if they were wearing the covers of small kitchen appliances.
The other post-war apotheosis of the zipper was the biker look. Marlon Brando set the style in The Wild Ones, and even today black-leather motorcycle jackets still bristle with shiny, sharp-tabbed metal zippers that suggest not only secrecy (all those little pockets and pouches) but speed and violence—and also often sex.
But, as a film expert I know says, “When you’re talking about zippers, you’re already talking about sex.” A dress that fastens with a long row of little buttons is a romantic challenge. A man needs patience, dexterity, and persuasive charm to get you out of it. A visible zipper, especially if it is partially unfastened, is a sort of silent come-on, but the kind of sex it suggests is passionate and immediate rather than romantic and long-term. Peeling your girlfriend (or your boyfriend) like a banana appears to be, and sometimes actually is, the work of a moment.