“In a cardigan or a crew neck, this model is just another model. In the hoodie, he is a folk demon and a scapegoat, a political symbol and a moving target…”

Author Date

In a cardigan or a crew neck, this model is just another model. In the hoodie, he is a folk demon and a scapegoat, a political symbol and a moving target, and the system of signs that weighs this upon him does not make special distinctions for an Italian cashmere hoodie timelessly designed in heather gray.

Watching Beyoncé’s recent video for Formation”, with its set piece showing a black child in a hooded sweatshirt disarming a rank of riot police with his dance moves, most Americans grasped the outfit as a rhetorical device serving a dreamlike declaration about protest and civil rights. During the N.F.L. playoffs, football fans saw the quarterback Cam Newton, the locus of a running dialogue about blackness, wear hoodies to interviews, and they read tweets that called him a “thug” for it. The boxing movie “Creed”, — starring Michael B. Jordan opposite Sylvester Stallone, who made the hoodie a fixture in “Rocky” (1976) — features rousing scenes of Jordan jogging across Philadelphia in a gray hoodie. The transfer of the garment from the old white champ to the young black contender plays as an echo of the film’s broader racial politics.

Troy Patterson, “On Clothing”, The New York Times Magazine (6 March 2016), 16.

Related posts:

  1. “The hooded sweatshirt emerged as a pop political object after decades of mundane hard work”
  2. “Bared by shorts, knees point us toward a few truths about social standards”
  3. “The blue chambray shirt is emblematic of a phenomenon that shows no sign of receding — the ever-accelerating chic of ‘yesterday’s blue-­collar brands’…”
  4. “The modern hosiery era began with the democratization of silk stockings, which were once on the verge of seeming a contemptible extravagance”