The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers Zipper Cover: Why a Working Zipper Was (Briefly) Real — Then Abandoned

The cover that famously featured a real working zipper was Sticky Fingers (1971). Designed by Andy Warhol, the album jacket had an actual metal zipper that you could unzip to reveal a pair of waistband and underwear printed underneath. It was a tactile, cheeky gimmick that matched the record’s raw blues-rock swagger.

But the zipper caused chaos. When records were stacked on top of each other, the metal teeth scratched the vinyl of the album below. Retailers complained. The zipper was also expensive to manufacture and had a tendency to snag. After the initial pressing, the record label replaced it with a printed, non-functional zipper. So the working zipper appeared only on early copies — meaning the concept wasn’t abandoned before release, but it was killed shortly after because it physically damaged the product.