Slap Bracelet Rerevolution

            Wasted Saturdays at the local videogame arcade ruled my childhood. Fastened around my waist, a neon-blue fanny pack bursting with quarters jostled and jiggled as I emphatically thrust black joysticks and tapped big red buttons, outmaneuvering my virtual opponents with cyber athleticism. Green tickets and golden tokens bought me lucky rabbit-foot key chains, bubblegum, fake tattoos, and most notably––slap bracelets. Thirty tickets bought a slap bracelet; that’s, like, half an hour’s worth of skeeball. Talk about value!

            Slap bracelets revolutionized my world. No need for tying or clasping; just watch them spring around your wrist and go. They came in every neon shade on the color wheel, not to mention camouflage, rainbow, puppy-dog, and kitty-cat prints. Every kid in elementary school, ranging from nerdy Norman to preening Patricia, had one. Kids used them as bartering tools.

            “I’ll give you this Babe Ruth rookie card for you leopard-print slap bracelet.”

            “I don’t know . . . ”

            “Okay, I’ll throw in my chocolate milk.”

            “Ummm, deal.”

            They were also the new friendship bracelets. Slap one on a kid at lunch and an instantaneous friendship was established, despite the PB&J smeared across his or her grinning face. Perhaps, though harmless, that almost imperceptible, painful pang elicited by a swift slap of the cloth-covered, inch-wide metal bands awakened the pseudo-masochistic cravings of children nation-wide. Somehow, slap bracelets became a fashion phenomenon that disappeared overnight. We can only hope they will slowly return to a generation unconsciously yearning for their nostalgic embrace.

            During a spring break solo-expedition from Eugene, Ore., to Orange County, Calif., after 10 years of slap bracelet-deprivation, I sat across from a high school friend and his college roommate, Scott, at 3 a.m. in a deserted Denny’s following a night of bowling. Because of the dark bowling alley, only then, with a plate of pancakes before me, did I notice the slap bracelet encircling Scott’s wrist. A childlike fascination overcame me––I wanted a swift slap. So I stuck out my wrist, fist clenched, in Scott’s direction. Like all slap bracelet fanatics, Scott understood the universal sign. He unfurled his green, pink, and yellow piece sign and flower-decorated slap bracelet and laid it on me. Its snug hugging squeeze held supernatural powers. I wanted to hold my wrist aloft like a mighty superhero. The geek inside seeped out. I suddenly desired to build tree forts, play Nintendo hour upon hour, read X-Men comics, and ride my Huffy to the mini-mart to buy Charleston Chews and Sugar Daddies.

            “Do you want it?” Scott asked.

            “Hell, yeah!”

            Despite the joy of rediscovery, I felt abnormal and dissident wearing the bracelet, as if I alone dared challenge society’s exile of the slap bracelet. That night, it was as if I sat at a round table in a dank, seedy brick basement with a group of revolutionaries. Hence, I rekindled my obsession with slap bracelets. But why was it so long in coming? I can’t remember why I stopped wearing them in the first place. Such is the way of flash fads.

            Neon colors, fanny packs, big hair and tight black leather pants of the 1980s gave way to the grunge of the 1990s alternative rock scene, and I was swept away with the rest. After all, you certainly can’t mosh and look grim with a fabulous radioactive-green slap bracelet glowing on your wrist.

            However, I have a theory. 1980s fashion has been making its comeback, and slap bracelets are riding the wave. It worked like this: in my teens, as with most kids, conformity in middle school and high school put a damper on most self-expression. Entering college, I experienced an explosion of perspectives and ideas, awakening as an individual and thus freer to define myself in style. The repressed inner geek broke free. Reenter the slap bracelet. It’s not that slap bracelets are just cool. They have universal appeal, because that pleasing pop is just undeniable. After casting off the social constraints of my teenage years, I’m free to get my slap on and so is everyone else.

            The other week, while wearing my new bracelet at Jameson’s (it’s a bar), people approached me with wide-eyed awe and asked, “Is that a slap bracelet?” Or they simply stuck out a confident wrist – the universal sign. I wear my bracelet on a regular basis, but its presence still evokes enthusiastic reactions from friends and strangers, and I can’t say I don’t like the attention. I even wear my slap bracelet to the Thai restaurant where I work. A Thai co- worker, Toy, thought I wore a bandage around my wrist, “because they make them look good now,” she said. I showed her the bracelet in action and it blew her mind; she had to try it on for herself. Later that day, while pouring water for a group of college students, a 20-something-year-old woman with long, curly black hair said, “I really like your bracelet.”

            “Thanks, I’d really like them to come back into style.”

            “I’m totally down with that,” she replied with exuberance. I was then reminded why slap bracelets are great. They bring people together. “If you give your friend a slap bracelet, it keeps you pretty close with that person,” said 11-year-old Chris Urso, a sixth grader at Lincoln Elementary School in Mount Vernon, N.Y., in a 1990 The New York Times article. They still have the ability to make friends out of people so long as they’ve shared that experience of wearing slap bracelets as children.

            Aside from aesthetics, today slap bracelets are also being used for utilitarian purposes. In long-distance running events such as Oregon’s 197- mile Hood to Coast Relay, they’re used as batons because they’re easily passed between runners, compared to their cumbersome, metal-rod predecessors. Bicyclists and road workers use them as reflective gear, and they’re handed out at concerts as promotional trinkets. They’ve also been converted into drink coolers that slap around any size bottle or can.

            Credit for the 1980s slap bracelet craze echoing in the present is owed to Stewart Anders, a high school shop teacher from Sun Prairie, Wis. In 1983, while fiddling with Venetian blind-style strips of metal, Anders invented the precursor to the original Slap Wrap, manufactured by Main Street Toy Company in Simsbury, Conn. Toy and Hobby World magazine editor Larry Carlat once said Slap Wraps were the most popular cheap-novelty toy since Pet Rocks. However, slap bracelets have been bogged down by misfortune. At their apex of popularity in the early 1990s, when recess playgrounds were bustling with slap bracelet-wearing adolescents, several incidents flagged the potential danger of the metal bands. Main Street Toy Company blamed these incidents on the plethora of knock-offs that flooded the market, made with inferior cloth coverings and shoddy, flimsy metal.

            In October 1990, Wallingford, Conn., resident 4-year-old Nicole Tomaso was playing with a knockoff and cut her finger and nail on an exposed metal edge. She ran screaming to her father who promptly filed a complaint with Connecticut’s Department of Consumer Protection. An investigation began and imitators faced recalls. That same month the Associated Press reported that children in Pelham, N.Y., “will just have to suffer being unfashionable, at least during school hours.” A child in the West Orchard Elementary School in Chappaqua, N.Y., removed her slap bracelet’s cloth covering and sliced her hand, requiring three stitches. Nation-wide, school principals soon banned the much beloved charms.

            “I’d like to think Slap Wraps will last 30 years,” Anders said 15 years ago. “But I know it won’t. I hope to be somewhere between Pet Rocks and the Hula Hoop.”

            Luckily, slap bracelets still exist. They can be ordered in bulk on the Internet in numerous designs and colors. However, they’re only marketed toward kids, and one can only speculate whether they’ll catch on again like they did in the 1980s.

            San Francisco retro designer Denaya Brooke, 24, thinks this is possible and that in the next few years they will be more readily available, considering the current influx of 1980s fashion. This influx, Brooke says, is part of a larger pattern of reinventing past trends, generally recycling every 10 years. “Nothing really new has happened and it’s going in a cycle. So right now we’re back in the 80s. Before this we were in the 70s,” she says.

            “Everything is a new twist on an old idea.” Next, she says we’ll revisit grunge.

            However, slap bracelets may not be part of that cycle because they are an “anti-fashion,” she says. “They were cast aside so hatefully.” Their target market, children, also isn’t helping them catch the now college-age generation that originally made them popular. But Brooke believes that current economic and political conditions favor slap bracelets. The recovering economy, Iraq war, and soaring oil prices leave people less money to spend on fancy clothes. They’re looking for inexpensive ways to make their getup chic. “Fashion is going toward an accessory age,” she says. “People are buying plainer clothes and accessorizing them.”

            We owe a great debt to the French Revolution for granting us such flexibility in style. The extravagant bourgeoisie culture and dress born from the rule of Louis XVI prodded the working class toward creating a republic of greater equality of expression. The Industrial Revolution quickly followed. A cross- flow of fashion from rich to poor, poor to rich was granted by more access to textiles and eventually the media. (For example, Mugatu’s Derelicte campaign in the movie Zoolander.) The opportunity to define oneself through garments increased, not simply by class but by interest in a circular, constantly evolving fashion world.

            So where do slap bracelets fit into this process? For some they’re a mutation, an obsolete trait that died out in a Darwinian landscape. For others, slap bracelets are akin to the Galapagos Island species, which were separated from the world long ago and adapted to their particular niche. Now the evolved slap bracelet has been rediscovered as an adaptation for a small devoted, demographic – children and eccentric 20-somethings endlessly fascinated with discarded 1980s gadgets.

Link to the original article in Oregon Voice: oregonvoice.com/pdfs/OV18_1.pdf