A History of the Fanny Pack

Remember the episode of Seinfeld where he has the man purse? Yeah, everybody got a good laugh from the idea of Jerry walking around with a purse. But really, when you stop to think about it, is the fanny pack different at all from a man purse? The fanny pack is an item of apparel that even men who are totally at ease with their own femininity, like me, just can’t bring themselves to wear. Even when it was marketed under the much more androgynous name of Belt Bag, a fanny pack was simply something that a certain level of testosterone would not allow certain men to wear. The really weird thing is that even though they are omnipresent now and appear to be either totally acceptable regardless of gender or totally unacceptable regardless of gender, fanny packs have not been around that long. In fact, it was only twenty years ago that Adweek magazine predicted fanny packs would be the hottest product of 1988. Indeed they were, and remain so today. Of course, they were popular for about twenty years before that among certain subcultures.

Fanny packs are one of the few fads that came about in the 1980s that aren’t easy to pin down inventor-wise. Unlike the Slap Wraps, for instance, one cannot point to single individual who came up with the idea. What is known is that fanny packs appeared to have originated as a necessity for members of the ski patrol. These guys needed to be able to ski out to those in help while carrying supplies, unburdened by having to use a free hand to get it there. The first fanny packs therefore carried medical and emergency supplies. Two-wheel bikers were next to pick up on the idea because the skintight spandex biker pants had no room for pockets, yet even bicyclists needed a place to carry such things as keys, wallets, and little black books for picking up chicks. Before too long makeshift fanny packs were seen around the waist of all varieties of people who were in the great outdoors.

Everyone from hikers to birdwatchers were using them. The first marketers of fanny packs were street vendors and others under the radar of commercial industrialists on the black market. These guys were making a killing by being on the ground floor a fad before the big boys in America discovered the secret. Once the merchants of cool and their persuaders discovered this particular brand of Texas tea the floodgates opened. Of course, Madison Avenue was never really particularly successful at making fanny packs cool, but they got around that by virtue of the fact that this was one fad that was actually useful. Which is probably the only reason why they have lasted so long. Really, the only way to instill a little bit of personality into the fanny pack wearer was to brand them with something that was already cool. As a result, fanny pack wearers have been giving free advertising to everything from the peak of hip, The Simpsons, to the nadir of the uncool, the Backstreet Boys. They come in colors ranging from Condi Rice white to neon green. You can buy a waterproof fanny pack for when you’re playing Indiana Jones in the Amazon basin or you can buy hand-made customized ones made of soft leather that cost more than regular people pay for gasoline in a month. There is only one kind of fanny pack you can’t buy.

One that makes your butt look small.