B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube

Anonymous design, or design without designers, might be understood in much the same way. We may not know who is responsible for the zip, in fact it may be impossible to be precise about assigning to it the name of any one designer. But there can be no doubt that the zip is one of many design innovations that defined the twentieth century. Some objects in this category are the product of the work of better-known individuals – the Tetra Pak, for example, developed by Ruben Rausing and Erik Wallenberg. Tetra Pak played a significant part in changing the way that a generation of Japanese growing up in the 1970s looked by making milk a part of the country’s staple diet.

It was another piece of low-tech innovation, the sea container, that transformed not just the shipping industry but the docks that accommodated it, and the port cities that depended on them, and so the world. Shipping containers demanded bigger ships, and big open-air docks. As a result London’s upstream docks closed, and within two decades were cleared to create the new financial district of Canary Wharf.

The ballpoint pen, or Biro, named for its inventor, is of course anything but anonymous, but it was the result of a simple but powerful insight into how to deliver an even line of ink in the most economical and efficient way.

By inviting us to examine objects that have become so familiar that they have disappeared from our conscious attention, we are being presented with a way to find what really drives design. It is an effective way to address the tension between the myth-making version of design and the reality of step-by-step refinements, between the cult of the individual genius and the way in which enterprises are driven by teams and groups.

Most highly charged in its symbolism is the use of the zip in place of fly buttons for trousers. Introduced after centuries of buttons, despite the risk of serious damage if incautiously raised, the zip came to be seen as a signal of shifting messages of sexual availability. The zip was celebrated by Erica Jong and deployed on Sticky Fingers, the Andy Warhol-designed Rolling Stones album cover.

Even if buttons are more demanding to deal with, they have survived. And with time, the zip has lost its functional associations with rational modernity.

The authorship of the zip has an equally complex story. Gideon Sundback, a Swedish-American inventor, filed a patent for the Hookless Fastener No. 2 with the US Patent Office in 1914. His work was a refinement of an idea for a fastener based on interlocking teeth that had been circulating among engineers for decades. Whitcomb Judson patented a design for a metal-clasp fastener in 1893, but it was difficult to make, and didn’t work very well. Before Sundback, no one had managed to get the zip quite right. The hooks were either too weak to hold two surfaces together, or they wore out too soon to be useful.

Sundback designed a needle-like projection on the top of each nib, and put a dent in the corresponding position on the underside of the tooth, which held them all firmly in place. Even if one of the row of teeth came apart, the rest were still locked in. It was different enough from Judson’s design for Sundback to get a patent.

The first customer for the new product, manufactured by the Hookless Fastener Company, was B. F. Goodrich, which started manufacturing rubber overshoes with a zip fastener in 1923. The zip turned putting the overshoes on and taking them off into a quick, single movement. Goodrich called it the Zip-er-Up, eventually contracting it to the Zipper, which in turn became the name of the fastener. And the Hookless Fastener Company renamed itself Talon at the same time.

In its first decade Hookless depended on Goodrich for most of its business. The zip was a relatively humble artefact, confined to footwear in its initial use. But by the 1930s, the zip had become an essential sign of modernity and it started to find customers everywhere. The zip was adopted by anyone in too much of a hurry to put up with the archaic customs of buttons. The distinctions of class and gender that buttons inevitably smuggle into almost any garment dependent on whether they are to the left or the right, precious metal, simple bone or cloth-covered, were made redundant by the zip. The workmanlike, no-nonsense, unfussy zip became the sign of the organized proletariat or those who wanted to be identified with it. Military uniforms started to adopt zips. The parka and the flying suit depended on them, as did the leather biker’s jacket. The zip could be positioned diagonally like a lightening flash across the chest, as it appeared on Dan Dare’s spacesuit, and added as a decorative flourish in entirely unnecessary places, such as the cuff in a belt-and-braces duplication.