In 1987, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted design-patent protection on a loop of fabric-covered elastic to a divorced nightclub singer named Rommy Hunt Revson, according to her obituary. She had built the prototype the year before on a $50 sewing machine, teaching herself to sew while house-sitting in Southampton, New York, according to NPR, which also reports that Revson had spent the prior decade working Manhattan nightclubs as a singer and pianist, not sewing anything. She named it “Scunci,” after her dog. You know it as the scrunchie, and depending on your age, you either wore one to a middle school dance or bought one on a resale app last month, ironically or otherwise.

A Yard-Sale Sewing Machine and a Ruined Blowout

Revson was tired of the plastic and metal hair ties that were snapping strands and yanking at her scalp, so she went looking for something softer, according to NPR. She bought fabric, found a used sewing machine for $50, and taught herself to sew inside of a few weeks. She twisted sturdy elastic into loops of cloth until she landed on a shape that held hair without pulling on it. She had recently split from her husband, John Revson, an heir to the Revlon cosmetics fortune, and was working with a house-sitter’s budget when she made the purchase. It’s one of pop culture’s odder coincidences: the accessory she made on that $50 machine would eventually sit on drugstore shelves a few feet from the cosmetics counters her married name was once attached to.

A Trademark Fight That Outlasted the Trend

The scrunchie caught on fast once licensees put it into production. By the late 1980s it was a genuine style fixture, spotted on Madonna, on Paula Abdul, and on Michelle Tanner’s ponytail in “Full House,” per NPR. Popularity brought copies, and Revson spent years afterward pursuing manufacturers that knocked off her patented design without a license, a fight her obituary describes as one of the defining battles of her post-invention life. Her design patent held until it expired in 2001, according to the same account, after which anyone could legally sew the shape she’d spent a decade defending.

NASA’s Payload, Then Carrie Bradshaw’s Punchline

NASA gave it its strangest line of work yet. Astronaut Pamela Melroy wore a navy blue scrunchie on two Space Shuttle missions to the International Space Station, STS-92 in 2000 and STS-112 in 2002, to keep her hair from floating loose and tangling in equipment, according to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, which now owns the object after Melroy donated it in 2004. The museum’s own catalog entry calls the scrunchie “an emblem of small but noticeable changes that occurred when women entered the workplace in space,” noting that the hair-containment problem has only ever applied to female astronauts, since no male astronaut has had long hair.

Then came the fall. A 2003 episode of “Sex and the City” gave the scrunchie its most public flogging, with Carrie Bradshaw scolding her novelist boyfriend for describing a fashionable Manhattanite wearing one, insisting no woman who worked at a glossy magazine and lived downtown would be caught dead in one, according to The Washington Post. One scripted line did what a decade of dwindling sales couldn’t: it made the scrunchie feel dated overnight.

Then Gen Z Found It Again

The comeback took roughly fifteen years. Y2K nostalgia dragged the scrunchie back into circulation around 2019, helped along by “Stranger Things” and a wave of shoppers rediscovering what was sitting in their mothers’ junk drawers, per NPR. By the time Revson died, the accessory had traveled so far from its $50-sewing-machine origins that Balenciaga was selling an oversized silk version for $275, according to The Washington Post. Her long-expired patent no longer entitled her to a cut of that markup.

Revson died on September 7, 2022, at 78, per NPR. She lived to see her invention go from bargain-bin staple to fashion-runway punchline to orbiting NASA hardware to luxury reissue, all inside one lifetime spent defending a patent for a piece of fabric-wrapped elastic she’d first sewn to save her own hair. A woman who spent her twenties and thirties singing in Manhattan clubs ended up better remembered for a sewing project she started on a whim in her forties, in a rented house, with a machine that cost less than most people now pay for the Balenciaga version.

That arc is the real pattern behind most objects this site obsesses over: the cheap, improvised fix gets mocked once it’s everywhere, missed once it’s gone, and eventually treated as proof, sometimes literally shelved in a museum, that necessity produces better design than intention usually does.