The Strange World of Trouser Closures

I recently had the idea for a new way of closing trousers. Imagine that instead of a zipper or buttons in the fly of your trousers, you found something like a ziplock closure? This idea held much appeal to me for the following reasons:

1. I have never seen it before.

2. It avoids both the time consumption of buttons, and the interlocking metal teeth of a zipper.

3. I feel like we could wear plastic more.

I initiated a patent search using google patents. You know, like you do. I have not yet satisfactorily answered the question of whether or not my idea has been patented. It seems there are at least 20,000 patents for even the most obscure idea I can think of.

I did, however, uncover a couple of entertaining products. Here is a design for the person who is supremely worried about the barn door coming open. It actually incorporates a padlock. Unfortunately, sexual armor turned out to be a lot less fun than hoped. It might even be described as the opposite of fun.

Speaking of the barn door opening, what if you had a traditional zipper that was mounted upside down? The zipper would not be prone to slowly unzip if it had to go upward to do so. Do I smell a patent here?

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