That street vendor in Brooklyn made me rethink my whole approach to zippers

Has anyone else had a random stranger totally flip how you see a basic design element?

2 comments

2 Comments

Wait, hold on - a street vendor changed your mind about zippers? I need to hear this story because zippers have always seemed pretty straightforward to me.

bettyhunt1mo ago

Oh man, Wesley, you're giving me way too much credit here. So I was at this little market in Florence, right, just wandering around, and there was this old guy who makes bags by hand. He had this beautiful leather satchel, and I was oohing and aahing over it, and then he pointed at the zipper and just sighed. He said zippers are the enemy of good leather because they force you to bend the material in ways it doesn't want to go, and they always break first. And I'm standing there thinking, you know, my whole life I've never once thought about zippers as anything but these little metal things that work fine until they don't. So now I look at a zipper and I'm like, "You're just waiting to betray me, aren't you?" But honestly, I'm not exactly a fashion expert - half my jackets have buttons missing, so take my zipper epiphany with a grain of salt.