"Life nowadays is dominated and complicated by the remorseless Zip. Blouses zip up, skirts zip down, ski-ing suits zip everywhere. 'Little frocks' have perfectly unnecessary bits of zipping on them just for fun.
Why? Is there anything more deadly than a Zip that turns nasty on you? It involves you in a far worse predicament than any ordinary button, clip, snap, buckle or hook and eye.
In the early days of Zips, my mother, thrilled by this delicious novelty, had a pair of corsets fashioned for her which zipped up the front. The results were unfortunate in the extreme! Not only was the original zipping-up fraught with extreme agony, but the corsets then obstinately refused to de-zip! Their removal was practically a surgical operation! And owing to my mother's delightful Victorian modesty, it seemed possible for a while that she would live in these corsets for the remainder of her life - a kind of modern Woman in the Iron Corset!
I have therefore always regarded the Zip with a wary eye. But it appears that
all travelling bags have zips.
"The old fashioned fastening is quite superseded, Modom [old colloquial for madam]," says the salesman, regarding me with a pitying look.
"This, you see, is so simple," he says, demonstrating.
There is no doubt about its simplicity - but then, I think to myself, the bag is empty.
"Well," I say, sighing, "one must move with the times,"
With some misgivings I buy the bag.
I am now the proud possessor of a Zip travelling bag"
[a few pages later]
… I return to contend with my own difficulty, which is, as prophetic vision had told me it would be, the Zip bag. Empty in Mr Gooch's shop, it had looked simple, attractive, and labour-saving. How merrily then had the Zip run too and fro! Now, full to the brim, the closing of it is a miracle of superhuman adjustment. The two edges have to be brought together with mathematical precision, and then, just as the Zip is travelling slowly across, complications set in, due to the corner of the sponge-bag. When at last it closes, I vow not to open it again until I get to Syria!
On reflection, however, this is hardly possible. What about the aforementioned sponge-bag? Am I to travel for five days unwashed? At the moment even that seems preferable to unzipping the Zip bag!"
Agatha Christie on the Zip revolution - writing in her 1946 autobiographical book "Come, Tell Me How You Live".
In 2010:
Zippers may have revolutionized our clothing since they were introduced in 1913, but they're also the leading cause of penile injuries requiring an ER visit for adults, according to a new study.
A study published in a recent issue of a British urology journal BJU International found 17,616 people went to the emergency room between 2002 and 2010 for genital injuries caused by zippers.
The majority of the patients were men under the age of 18, the study found. Zipper-related injuries accounted for 20 percent of all recorded penile injuries during this time. However, five women also experienced labia or vaginal harm because of zippers, researchers found.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/more-than-17000-genital-injuries-tied-to-zippers/
