There are devices in the retail world we take for granted. Let’s stop doing that.
Safety pin
- Patented: 1849
- First patent holder: Walter Hunt
Pincoming: At a fashion show, you’d expect the safety pins to be hidden, a last-minute adjustment to make pants or a blazer fit just right. But at the Tory Burch show at this month’s New York Fashion Week, they were loud and proud: oversized safety pins that served as design flourishes on skirts and dresses.
Long before the safety pin, there were other ways to clasp clothing shut. For millennia, primitive forms of brooches called fibulae were used to keep cloaks and—fingers crossed—togas secured.
But the pointy bit of the fibula often was exposed, posing a hazard to both wearers and anyone who brushed against them.
One day in 1848, Walter Hunt, a New York City inventor, was distractedly twisting a brass wire, according to an account in America the Ingenious: How a Nation of Dreamers, Immigrants, and Tinkerers Changed the World by Kevin Baker. Hunt, who had coiled one section, noticed how the coil created tension and the wire would spring back.
It was, Baker wrote, a “Eureka!” moment. Hunt went to his machine shop and coiled the middle of a wire, sharpened one end to a point, formed a clasp at the opposite end, and tucked the pointy end into it—what we’d recognize today as the safety pin.
Hunt was granted a patent for what he called a “Dress-Pin” in 1849. He didn’t call it a safety pin, but in his patent application wrote that one of “the great advantages” of the objects was the “perfect convenience of inserting these into the dress, without danger of…wounding the fingers.”
The safety pin would become ubiquitous, but it didn’t make Hunt rich.
According to America the Ingenious, he sold the patent the same year he’d been granted it to a manufacturer, Jonathan Richardson, for $400.
Pin style: Safety pins were, in every sense, attached to the early punk movement, most famously when Sex Pistols’ frontman Johnny Rotten wore a shirt held together with safety pins in the music video for “God Save the Queen” in 1977.
“Although punk…began as a free expression in style and music,” fashion historian Shaun Cole told Billboard in 2016, “it quickly became codified, and the safety pin became one of the elements that signified punk.”
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A punkified image of Queen Elizabeth II, with a safety pin through her lip, was printed on T-shirts in 1977 by designer Vivienne Westwood, who died in December.
Ever since, fashion designers have incorporated safety pins, often to invoke the punk aesthetic, albeit for luxury items.
In 1994, for example, Elizabeth Hurley appeared on the red carpet for a movie premiere wearing a Donatella Versace dress with wide side panels along the side held together (barely) by oversized safety pins. The dress was such a sensation that decades later it’s still among the top results when Googling “that dress.”
As for the impact of the safety-pin dress on the Versace brand, CNN wrote in 2020 that it “boosted Versace’s reputation as a fashion house whose designs”—here it quotes Hurley—”celebrate the female form rather than eliminate it.”
Among other examples cited in a 2017 article, “10 of the most iconic safety pin moments in fashion,” in AnOther magazine:
- Stephen Sprouse designed a dress in 1987 made entirely with gold safety pins.
- Jean Paul Gaultier featured interlocking large safety pins as closures for a line of jackets and vests in 1990.
- For a Maison Margiela collection in 2016, designer John Galliano used safety pins to make mosaic-like images on clothing, including a bird taking flight.
Safety in numbers: In the wake of the Brexit vote in June 2016, when the UK’s National Police Chiefs’ Council reported a 57% increase in reports of hate crimes, #safetypin surged on Twitter.
Britons posted photos on social media wearing safety pins on their shirts or coats to support those who’d been targeted. Typical was the author Emma Pass, who tweeted a selfie with a safety pin on her lapel, writing, “Wearing a #safetypin to show solidarity with EU citizens and immigrants here in the UK. #youarewelcomehere.”
Later that year, following the election of Donald Trump in November—when some LGBTQ people, minority groups, and women took offense to remarks he’d made during his campaign—#safetypin caught on in the US. Among those who tweeted photos of themselves wearing a safety pin on Twitter was actor Patrick Stewart, who has 3.5 million followers.