In her 2009 book, Punks: A Guide to an American Subculture, Sharon M. But that humility was broken when the safety pin made its way to popularity during the punk rock era of the 1970s. The safety pin’s life has been long but mostly modest for more than a century, it quietly retained its original purpose, fastening pieces of fabric and items of clothing together. The term is still used today to refer to money used for spending on inessentials. In time, pin money expanded its meaning, covering clothing and other personal expenses. In the 19th century, mechanization made safety pins easier to produce, eventually driving prices down. It was then that the court ladies and city dames flocked to the depots to buy them, having been first provided with money by their husbands.” According to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, published in 1870, “Long after the invention of pins, in the fourteenth century, the maker was allowed to sell them in open shop only on January 1st and 2nd. Women were given “pin money” by their husbands to purchase pins for their dresses and gowns. As Hunt wrote in the patent, “Another great advantage unknown in other plans is found in the perfect convenience of inserting these into the dress, without danger of bending the pin, or wounding the fingers, which renders them equally adapted to either ornamental, common dress or nursery uses.” In Ukraine, safety pins are attached to the inside of children’s clothes to ward off evil spirits. Hunt used brass, coiled it at the center and formed a clasp on one end, shielding the wearer. The design was ingenious because the pin was constructed from a single measure of wire. Hunt patented the safety pin, which he called a dress pin. This problem was solved by the American mechanic Walter Hunt, in 1849. Both the fibula and the brooch are historic examples of conspicuous consumption, a term coined by the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen in his 1899 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, to describe the practice of displaying status and wealth by purchasing expensive, unnecessary items.īut neither accessory protected the user from the pin’s sharp edge. With its ornate, highly crafted designs, the brooch functioned almost exclusively as a status symbol for the wearer. The fibula later evolved into the brooch, a decorative jewelry item used to fasten men’s cloaks and adorn women’s dress and hair. As a result, they emphasized class differences, since only the wealthy could afford such costly ornaments. Made from expensive materials such as bronze, silver, and gold, the design of fibulae became more detailed and elaborate. Since a fibula was visible to the public eye, it soon became more decorative than utilitarian.
The Etruscans used them to fasten dresses and cloaks. Another design, which resembles today’s safety pin, consists of one straight pin coiled in the middle to form a loop, with one end shaped into a bent hook where the other end rests.įibulae were used by the Romans to hold their togas in place. The bow’s left tip fits neatly into the hole of the first pin, while its right tip forms a bent hook upon which the first pin’s tip rests. One of the fibula’s earliest designs deployed two separate pins: one with a hole on its left tip and another forming the bow or arc. Its origins can be traced back to the fibula, an ornamental clasp used in Europe during the Early Bronze Age to hold clothing together. I always marveled at how elegantly she fastened the safety pin, with only the slightest trace showing on the buttonhole, the clasp neatly tucked underneath, invisible.Īs a tool, the safety pin’s design has remained largely unchanged for millennia. She would rummage around her bag and produce a safety pin, fastening my blouse gently with it, taking extra care not to prick me. My mother, with her carefully trained eye, always knew when I had lost a button on my school uniform.
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