The scrunchie is ubiquitous. Even though the scrunchie’s popularity in fashion and pop culture has waxed and waned since its beginnings in 1986, it has steadfastly refused to disappear.
While some praised it as a brilliant invention that serves a practical purpose while also being stylish, while others as an accessory that screams “suburbs.”
Whatever the case may be, former singer and pianist Rommy Hunt Revson, who is widely credited with creating fabric-wrapped elastic, has made her imprint on the world of fashion.
In an interview with The New York Times, Alan Rothfeld, Revson’s estate attorney, stated her cause of death was a ruptured ascending aorta. She sought medical attention for Cushing’s disease and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome as well. She passed away on September 7 at age 78.
When was the scrunchie invented?
In 1986, Revson, who had previously worked as a nightclub singer and gave vocal lessons in New York City, thought of a hair band that could hold a ponytail without damaging hair.
As a replacement for traditional hair ties, she came up with the scrunchie. It so occurred when she was house-sitting in the Hamptons. She divorced John Revson, heir to the Revlon fortune, and she said she had no claim to any of the fortune, so had to make money where she could. Due to emotional strain, she started losing her hair. She resolved to design a hairpiece that would be easy on her fragile hair.
She told Talk Business & Politics, “I went to South Hampton, where I purchased fabric and spotted a $50-used sewing machine.” It was a costly purchase for my house-sitting budget, but I purchased it and brought it home.”
Revson created a stretchable, fabric-covered hair tie in a matter of weeks using a secondhand sewing machine. The “Scunci” (pronounced SKOON-Chee) was inspired by the form of the elastic waistband of her sweatpants and was named after her dog. However, when the product’s popularity grew, the term changed to “scrunchie.”
In 1987, Revson was granted a patent for the design, and after she introduced the product to stores, it quickly became a bestseller. The product took off in the late ’80s and ’90s, and in the years that followed, many major merchants produced their own versions of the scrunchie.
Although Philips Meyers was credited with inventing a similar product in 1963, the one that became ubiquitous was developed by Revson.
Scrunchies: Their History of Rise and fall (rise again)
In 2019, Sara Radin, a self-described scrunchie devotee and temporarily the internet’s unofficial scrunchie historian, claimed in a post for Teen Vogue that the design benefited women in the 1980s.
“In a time when long hair was in, the scrunchie offered women a way to pull it back without damaging it, unlike standard rubber bands, while taking basic hair ties to another level,” wrote Radin. “On top of that, it was just another way to accessorize their already extravagant looks.”
Later on, the scrunchie became a global phenomenon thanks to the likes of Madonna, Paula Abdul, and Michell Tanner (Full House). In the mid-1990s, sitcoms like Full House, Friends, and Seinfeld helped take it to another level.
The blue scrunchie used by NASA astronaut Pamela Melroy is preserved in the Smithsonian even today.
Eventually, the scrunchie craze fizzled out, as do many fashion trends.
Patrick Michael Hughes, a fashion and decorative arts historian at Parsons School of Design, noted, “Trends tend to go away when they become very en masse, and get linked with a specific type of person.”
By 2003, the scrunchie had lost most of its charm. Iconic Sex and the City character Carrie Bradshaw was so harsh on the scrunchie in one episode that it became socially unacceptable to wear one. She gasped at the idea of a tough New York woman wearing a scrunchie.
The scrunchie renaissance is here!
Scrunchies have also made a comeback to television, most notably in the Netflix original series Stranger Things.
Famous people including Selena Gomez, Gigi Hadid, Bella Hadid, Jennifer Lopez, Kim Kardashian, and Hailey Bieber have all been spotted recently wearing scrunchies, which made a reappearance in the late 2010s. You can also see models wearing it with pleasure while walking the runway.
The number of Google searches related to scrunchies increased dramatically in 2019 and has stayed consistently higher than they were before 2019.
Therefore, we can confidently claim that Revson’s legacy to the fashion business will be recognized for many years to come.
