B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube

Anonymous design, or design without designers, might be understood in much the same way. We may not know who is responsible for the zip, in fact it may be impossible to be precise about assigning to it the name of any one designer. But there can be no doubt that the zip is one of many design innovations that defined the twentieth century. Some objects in this category are the product of the work of better-known individuals – the Tetra Pak, for example, developed by Ruben Rausing and Erik Wallenberg. Tetra Pak played a significant part in changing the way that a generation of Japanese growing up in the 1970s looked by making milk a part of the country’s staple diet.

It was another piece of low-tech innovation, the sea container, that transformed not just the shipping industry but the docks that accommodated it, and the port cities that depended on them, and so the world. Shipping containers demanded bigger ships, and big open-air docks. As a result London’s upstream docks closed, and within two decades were cleared to create the new financial district of Canary Wharf.

The ballpoint pen, or Biro, named for its inventor, is of course anything but anonymous, but it was the result of a simple but powerful insight into how to deliver an even line of ink in the most economical and efficient way.

By inviting us to examine objects that have become so familiar that they have disappeared from our conscious attention, we are being presented with a way to find what really drives design. It is an effective way to address the tension between the myth-making version of design and the reality of step-by-step refinements, between the cult of the individual genius and the way in which enterprises are driven by teams and groups.

Most highly charged in its symbolism is the use of the zip in place of fly buttons for trousers. Introduced after centuries of buttons, despite the risk of serious damage if incautiously raised, the zip came to be seen as a signal of shifting messages of sexual availability. The zip was celebrated by Erica Jong and deployed on Sticky Fingers, the Andy Warhol-designed Rolling Stones album cover.

Even if buttons are more demanding to deal with, they have survived. And with time, the zip has lost its functional associations with rational modernity.

The authorship of the zip has an equally complex story. Gideon Sundback, a Swedish-American inventor, filed a patent for the Hookless Fastener No. 2 with the US Patent Office in 1914. His work was a refinement of an idea for a fastener based on interlocking teeth that had been circulating among engineers for decades. Whitcomb Judson patented a design for a metal-clasp fastener in 1893, but it was difficult to make, and didn’t work very well. Before Sundback, no one had managed to get the zip quite right. The hooks were either too weak to hold two surfaces together, or they wore out too soon to be useful.

Sundback designed a needle-like projection on the top of each nib, and put a dent in the corresponding position on the underside of the tooth, which held them all firmly in place. Even if one of the row of teeth came apart, the rest were still locked in. It was different enough from Judson’s design for Sundback to get a patent.

The first customer for the new product, manufactured by the Hookless Fastener Company, was B. F. Goodrich, which started manufacturing rubber overshoes with a zip fastener in 1923. The zip turned putting the overshoes on and taking them off into a quick, single movement. Goodrich called it the Zip-er-Up, eventually contracting it to the Zipper, which in turn became the name of the fastener. And the Hookless Fastener Company renamed itself Talon at the same time.

In its first decade Hookless depended on Goodrich for most of its business. The zip was a relatively humble artefact, confined to footwear in its initial use. But by the 1930s, the zip had become an essential sign of modernity and it started to find customers everywhere. The zip was adopted by anyone in too much of a hurry to put up with the archaic customs of buttons. The distinctions of class and gender that buttons inevitably smuggle into almost any garment dependent on whether they are to the left or the right, precious metal, simple bone or cloth-covered, were made redundant by the zip. The workmanlike, no-nonsense, unfussy zip became the sign of the organized proletariat or those who wanted to be identified with it. Military uniforms started to adopt zips. The parka and the flying suit depended on them, as did the leather biker’s jacket. The zip could be positioned diagonally like a lightening flash across the chest, as it appeared on Dan Dare’s spacesuit, and added as a decorative flourish in entirely unnecessary places, such as the cuff in a belt-and-braces duplication.

In Vienna modernity was in fact associated more with the end of a society than with the beginning of a new one. Vienna at the end of the twentieth century was a city that felt maimed by the loss of the group which had done so much to create its intellectual and creative life. Cultural life in the void they left had been defined by the darkness of the Actionists – artists such as Hermann Nitsch, who worked with blood and flesh in a sustained howl of anguish, and Wolf Prix’s equally violent and troubled architecture. The remains of the first modernity may still physically be present. But the people who had called it into being are gone.

Some affluent middle-class schoolchildren in London will adopt the speech rhythms of the children of Caribbean migrants as a defence mechanism in order to blend in with their age group on the street, rather than the other way around. Others feel self-confident enough to believe they can maintain their status even while adopting the tastes and styles of other classes.

Taste is not always a process that describes the aspirations of the proletariat to look like their social superiors. Tattoos, tracksuits and an interest in football have all been adopted by the middle classes in the last three decades. Ghetto youth in the US took to wearing their trousers very low, as a reflection of a look that most likely had its origins in the prisons where inmates’ belts were removed. It made them look tough. It is a style that can now be seen to be adopted by public-school boys in Britain by way of Alexander McQueen.

When British football teams started to play in Europe in the 1980s, their working-class followers, themselves the products of a culture in which clothes were a passion, saw their Italian rivals wearing Lacoste and Fila. Their response was to acquire the same labels, or in a kind of nationalistic reflex to adopt the nearest domestic equivalent. And so, after the Mods and the Skinheads, was born the Casual tribe. And from out of the Casuals came even less fashionable working-class sub-cultures. They settled on Burberry, or what appeared to be Burberry, for their baseball caps, their scarves and their shorts. The beige/black-and-red Burberry pattern was pirated everywhere. Burberry had to address the problem, partly by dealing with counterfeiters and discounters, and partly by investing heavily in a more creative interpretation of Burberry’s identity. Christopher Bailey made Burberryness a much subtler quality than the crass application of a pattern.

German philosophers and sociologists and French structuralists, from Immanuel Kant to Pierre Bourdieu by way of Georg Simmel, have understood taste and fashion (which for them is almost the same thing) as the means by which class is signalled and defined. In the Kant-to-Simmel scheme of things, ruling classes set fashions and create tastes, while the rest of the pack struggle to catch up but can never quite manage it. By the time the socially disadvantaged get anywhere near them, the elite taste-setters have changed the rules and skipped ahead again.

Throughout his life, Sottsass managed to pursue two parallel careers. At the same time that he was working on the mass-produced, trying to give some sense of dignity to the mundane, he was also creating ceramics and glass, and limited-edition furniture pieces that had the emotional intensity of art.

Sottsass always maintained a presence beyond Olivetti, in his own studio, exploring more personal ideas of what design might be. When, in the 1980s, the Memphis movement exploded the conventional idea of what passed for contemporary design, Sottsass, who was its guiding genius, had already qualified for his pension. But far from giving up, Sottsass was embarking on what turned out to be the most successful and creative period in a career that had already been exceptional.

For two decades, when it was still a family-run business, Sottsass remained closely associated with Olivetti and his studio-designed typewriters, office furniture, adding machines and accessories. They served to define the idea of modern office equipment for a while. But Olivetti was never able to fully adjust to the digital world; and this reluctance to adapt to change eventually destroyed the company. It had grown on the strength of the ability of its engineers to make mechanisms that drove adding machines, calculators and typewriters, skills that were rapidly becoming redundant.