Whether we’re exchanging locks of hair or bright plastic beads, humans have been finding ways to honor our friends for millennia.
Mariale and Paula Nuñez, sisters from Peru, show off their friendship bracelets before Taylor Swift’s concert in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The exchange of friendship bracelets at her performances are the latest in decades of bracelet-swapping at music events.
Photograph by Sarah Pabst, The New York Times/ Redux
Timeless, meaningful, and reciprocal, friendships are central to the human experience, and we have been honoring these special relationships for millennia. One of the ways people have marked these bonds is by exchanging friendship bracelets.
It’s hard to have avoided encountering friendship bracelets in the past few decades, whether you were weaving threaded bands at summer camp or buying two-piece “best friend” charms that fit together like a puzzle. Maybe you’ve seen them exchanged at a Taylor Swift concert, where friendship bracelets symbolize a community and a memento of a shared experience. You may have even noticed friendship bracelets in recent headlines as politicians exchanged their own.
Since at least the 1980s, American children have worn and exchanged these colorful fabric accessories. These bracelets don’t have a single origin story, and they aren’t the only symbol of a friendship bond between two people. Here are the stories of the symbols and traditions that have honored friendships throughout history and around the world.
The gift of friendship
For much of history, bonds of friendship have been strengthened and symbolized through the exchange of gifts. As Hávamál, a 10-century Norse poem, advised, “Friends shall gladden each other with arms and garments, / As each for himself can see; / Gift-givers’ friendships are longest found, / If fair their fates may be.”
In the 16th century, Dutch theologian Erasmus bestowed his friends with paintings, books, and ancient coins, which became a kind of currency of friendship among early modern humanists.
By the 18th and 19th centuries in Ireland, the Claddagh ring had gained traction as a symbol of both love and friendship: the heart on the ring represents love, while the clasped hands represent friendship. As a circular object, the ring itself represents an everlasting bond between two people.
One theory posits the Claddagh symbol draws inspiration from the medieval fede ring, an image of clasped hands. This symbol itself has roots in ancient Rome, when the act of “dextrarum iuncto”––“the joining of hands”— had multiple meanings, including friendship. On the other side of the world, the Japanese adopted a similar symbol: the character for “tomo,” meaning “friend,” depicts joined hands. Like hands bound together, knots also came to represent friendship in European history. By the 14th century, multiple knighthood orders began using knots to represent ties of friendship.
By the 18th century, friends were exchanging locks of hair, which degrades very slowly. Like friendship, so the belief went, hair seemed to be eternal. Gifting locks of hair may be best known as a lover’s gift or a memento of a deceased loved one, but friends also exchanged them. George Washington even gifted his hair to some of his intimates, including fellow founding father Alexander Hamilton.
Often, friends set locks of hair in jewelry––such as bracelets and necklaces––so that they could carry a part of their friend with them wherever they went. Former first lady Abigail Adams did just that in 1805 when she exchanged locks of hair with her friend Mercy Otis Warren and set them in a ring and brooch.
Throughout the 19th century friends exchanged friendship brooches. They sometimes featured ivy flowers, which Victorians associated with fidelity, and the phrase, “Nothing can detach me from you.” As one advertisement for friendship brooches declared in 1913, the brooch’s circular shape was, “like friendship, endless.”
Friendship bracelets are born
By the end of the 20th century, a new friendship symbol and gift-giving ritual took hold: friendship bracelets, which tend to be brightly colored and woven.
No one knows exactly where friendship bracelets came from or how the tradition started, but they may have their roots in woven bracelets from Central America. Drawing from rich Mayan weaving traditions, these natural fiber bracelets found their way onto the wrists of young Americans in the 1960s. Embracing the era’s counter-culture movement, they appreciated fashion crafted from natural fibers. These accessories represented the naturalism of the era, which included long hair, flowing blouses, earthy tones, and simpler silhouettes.
By the 1980s, natural fiber bracelets had become what we recognize today as friendship bracelets. Traded at sleepovers, campfires, and schoolyards, they became a familiar feature of childhood for Generation X and Millennials.
Friendship bracelets had been embraced so thoroughly by the end of the decade that they even featured on a 1989 episode of the popular teen sitcom Saved by the Bell, when the main characters launched a business selling them to their fellow students at Bayside High School.
Music-lovers created new rituals around exchanging bracelets
In the early 1990s, another bracelet ritual emerged, this time from the underground electronic dance music (EDM) scene. Kandi bracelets––bracelets with brightly colored plastic beads––became the currency of EDM raves. Rave-goers would swap kandi bracelets with one another, a social ritual of exchange that bound them together through their shared love of EDM.
The Swifties who trade lyric-clad friendship bracelets at Taylor Swift concerts are enacting a ritual not unlike the kandi exchange of the EDM movement.
Kandis, friendship bracelets, and Swiftie accessories all represent different things to the people who exchange them––the shared love of a specific musical genre, the adoption of a best friend forever, and the thrill of sharing in an imagined community with like-minded fans. All capture the same impulse, one that is as old as humanity itself: that finding a kindred spirit in the great, wide world is something worth celebrating.
