A lapel pin, also known as an enamel pin, is a small pin worn on clothing, often on the lapel of a jacket, attached to a bag, or displayed on a piece of fabric. Lapel pins can be decorative, or can indicate the wearer's affiliation with a cause or an organization, such as a fraternal order or religious order; in the case of a chivalric order, the lapel pin is in the form of a rosette. Before the popularity of wearing lapel pins, boutonnières were worn.
Pins are often collected and traded.
Lapel pins are frequently used as symbols of achievement and belonging in different organizations. Lapel pins from the organization are often collected by members and non-members alike.
Businesses and political parties also use lapel pins to designate achievement and membership. Lapel pins are a common element of employee recognition programs, and they are presented to individuals as a symbol of an accomplishment. Like fraternity and sorority pins, these lapel pins instill a sense of belonging to an elite group of performers at the organization. Businesses also award lapel pins to employees more frequently to boost employee morale, productivity, and employee engagement.
The Soviet Union had great production of these. Besides pins showing political figures and as souvenirs for tourist spots, there were pins for various sports, cultural, and political gatherings and for technical achievements of the Soviet Union.
Pin collecting and trading has also become a popular hobby. Demand for pin designs based on popular cartoon characters and themes such as Disney, Betty Boop, and Hard Rock Cafe has surged and led to the creation of pin trading events and other social activities. Disney pin trading is a prime example of this.
In the United States, the flag did not become a symbol of individual patriotism until the Civil War. As the Confederacy gained early victories, Northerners began displaying the flag on their homes and businesses as a show of support for the Union. After the war, this civilian identification with the flag persisted, laying the groundwork for it to eventually become a widespread personal accessory. Before the mid-20th century, however, flag lapel pins were exceedingly rare; the standardized flag pin as a fashion and political item did not emerge until the 1950s.
In the USSR and the People's Republic of China, lapel pins with portraits of Lenin and Mao Zedong, respectively, were worn by youth as well as by Communist party members or people who felt like showing their official political credo. In Czechoslovakia, the Mao badges/pins were worn in the late 1960s and early 1970s by non-conformist youth as a prank and a way to provoke the "normalisationist" reactionaries of the purged post-1968 Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.
In the 1970s, initiates of Guru Maharaj Ji extensively used buttons, sometimes quite large, with images of the guru's face on them.
Politicians in the United States often wear American flag lapel pins, especially after the attacks of September 11, 2001. By 2008, the flag pin had become "the quickest sartorial method for a politician to telegraph his or her patriotism", according to Time magazine. The practice declined somewhat in the following decade.
The modern American political tradition of wearing a flag lapel pin is generally traced to President Richard Nixon, who was the first U.S. president to make it a regular feature of his attire. According to historians and flag memorabilia collectors, flag-related jewelry was rare for both men and women until the 1950s, as prior to that era one might find only uncommon flag brooches or formal tuxedo buttons. Nixon's adoption of the pin is widely attributed to a scene he observed in the 1972 Robert Redford film The Candidate, after which he directed his White House staff to begin wearing flag pins as well. During the Vietnam War, the pin became a political flashpoint: supporters wore it to signal patriotism, while anti-war demonstrators sometimes wore the pin upside downâÂÂthe traditional maritime signal for distressâÂÂas a form of protest.
Almost all manufacturing is currently done in China, specifically in and around Kunshan, a satellite city in the greater Suzhou region that is administratively at the county-level in southeast Jiangsu, China, just outside Shanghai. Inexpensive labor in China has made non-Chinese production of lapel pins few and far between. There are still multiple online shops run by people outside of China who make and sell lapel pins.
In the die struck manufacturing process, there are five basic types of pins: Cloisonné, soft enamel, photo etched, screen printed and 4-color printed. In all processes, the outer shape of the pin is stamped out from a sheet of steel, aluminum, copper, brass, or iron. In the case of cloisonne and soft enamel, the shape and the design are stamped out. Nowadays, due to the low melting point and low price of zinc alloy, a large number of lapel pins are made of die-cast zinc alloy.
The backside of a lapel pin holds the pin in place, and attachment pieces come in a variety of styles.