Rommy Hunt Revson spent more than a decade collecting roughly $1 million a year in royalties off a hair tie made from spare fabric and a sewing machine she taught herself to use, according to a detailed accounting of her career. She wasn’t a fashion executive or a textile engineer. She was a former nightclub singer and vocal teacher who, in 1986, got tired of metal and plastic hair ties damaging her hair and decided to fix it herself. The fix became the scrunchie, patented in 1987, sold under license for the rest of her life, and by the time its original patent expired in 2001, more than two billion had been sold worldwide. Revson died on September 7, 2022, in Rochester, Minnesota, at 78, having spent much of her later career defending her claim to have invented it at all.

A Hair Tie Built to Not Do What Elastic Does

The invention story, as Revson told it, was almost accidental. While house-sitting in the Hamptons in 1986, she grew frustrated with how conventional elastic bands snagged and pulled at her hair, so she bought fabric and a secondhand sewing machine and worked out a design that wrapped a plain elastic band inside a loose tube of cloth, cushioning the hair from the elastic itself, according to the Washington Post. She named it “Scunci,” after her pet poodle, and the product’s spelling and pronunciation drifted toward “scrunchie” as it caught on. She received a design patent for the invention in 1987, per an obituary account of her career, and rather than manufacture the product herself at scale, she licensed the patent to outside makers, a decision that let the scrunchie spread through drugstores and department stores far faster than a single small business could have managed on its own, according to Wikipedia’s sourced account of her career.

Fast Money, Then a Long Fight Over Credit

Early demand outran what Revson’s initial operation could fulfill: her business generated $20 million in orders within its first months on the market, according to Wikipedia’s sourced account of her career, before she moved to a licensing model that paid her steadily instead. That success made the scrunchie an obvious target for imitation, and Revson spent years pursuing unlicensed copycats making cheaper versions without paying her, per Legacy.com’s obituary coverage. She also had to contend with competing origin stories. Some retrospectives on the accessory’s history point to a hair item designed by Philips Meyers in 1963 as an earlier, similar concept, according to NPR, but it’s Revson’s 1986 design and 1987 patent that became the version stocked on shelves, licensed for royalties, and eventually recognized as the scrunchie’s actual commercial origin.

From Discount Bin to Smithsonian Case

The scrunchie’s cultural standing didn’t move in a straight line. By the early 2000s it had become a punchline for outdated style, memorialized in a 2003 “Sex and the City” episode where Carrie Bradshaw treats a scrunchie as a symbol of someone who has stopped trying, according to Texas Public Radio. That verdict didn’t hold. The scrunchie came back into mainstream fashion beginning around 2017 and had fully arrived by 2019, at which point Balenciaga was selling an oversized silk version for $275, per Texas Public Radio’s reporting. Revson lived to see both her invention’s fall from favor and its return to runway relevance; her original prototype and the sewing machine she used to build it are now held in the Smithsonian Institution’s collections, according to Legacy.com. She had been married to John Revson, an heir to the Revlon cosmetics fortune, but by her own account had no claim on that money, which made the scrunchie royalties something closer to a self-made second act than a footnote to a wealthier marriage.

What Revson protected for 35 years wasn’t really the scrunchie itself, since patents expire and shapes get copied regardless. It was the fact that her name, and not someone else’s, would be attached to the moment a spare bolt of fabric and a Hamptons sewing machine turned into a two-billion-unit product.