Ad Campaign – Talon Zippers, 1972

We put as much care into the things we make as you put into the things you make.

By 1972, the metal zipper was considered to be terribly old fashioned, though the zipper makers continued to produce them for the many old fashioned seamstresses who did not trust the flimsy nylon ones.  (It did not help that the very earliest models on the market were prone to failure, and that it took a while before people realized that nylon zippers and hot irons do not mix.)  My grandmother was one such home sewer who distrusted nylon zippers, though she didn’t have to worry about it much because she had been forced to retire her sewing machine due to arthritis.

But in 1972 I was a thriving sewer, like the young woman in the ad.  If people think that DIY is a new phenomena, then they do not know the 70s.  By the time I started sewing in the mid to late 1960s, all the bugs had been worked out of the nylon coil, and I had no trust issues.

One of the big items of debate is recent years has been the question of the start of the nylon coil zipper.  Thanks to Robert Friedel’s book, Zipper, I can now say with certainty that the Talon Zephyr was introduced to the US market in March, 1960.  That means that any garment with the original Talon nylon zipper cannot have been made before that date.

The story is different in Europe.  The German zipper company, Opti-Werk, began manufacturing nylon coil zippers in 1955.

So it all depends on the little name embossed on the zipper pull as to whether an item with a nylon coil zipper could have been made in the 1950s.