In the hood
[font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]It is the slouchy, unisex garment of choice for a generation. But who hasn't quickened their step when faced with an unknown figure wearing one? Now a shopping centre even wants to ban them. Gareth McLean on the meaning of the hoodie[/font]
[font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Friday May 13, 2005
The Guardian
[/font][font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Really, it's only a sweatshirt with an extra bit. And sometimes a zip. And possibly pockets. It is not made of chainmail, of Batman's offcuts, or of the very fabric of evil itself. Indeed, nowadays, you're lucky to get one that's 100% cotton. And yet, the hooded top can strike fear into the heart of even the most courageous among us. A lone figure behind us on the walk home - hood up, head down - and we quicken our steps. Someone solitary and hooded at the back of the bus, and we opt for a seat near the front. A group of hooded teenagers on the street, and we're tensing our shoulders, clenching our fists (round handbag strap or housekeys-cum- weapon), training our ears for verbal abuse in order to emphatically ignore it. Just as leather trenchcoats are associated with goths, Matrix fans and ageing lotharios, so the hoodie has become a signifier of disgruntled, malevolent youth, scowling and indolent. The hoodie is the uniform of the troublemaker: its wearer may as well be emblazoned with a scarlet letter .[/font]
For this reason, the managers of Bluewater shopping centre in Kent have drawn up a code of conduct for the centre - a dress code, if you will. Wearing clothing that obscures the face - hooded tops, baseball caps - will not be allowed. Those persevering with such anti-social, CCTV-foiling fashion choices will be asked to leave the mall. While there's a bigger argument to be had about the privatisation of public spaces and Bluewater's ability to enforce a dress code on its customers, it would not seem to be one John Prescott fancies engaging in. He told the BBC he welcomed Bluewater's decision, following an incident in a motorway cafe when he was surrounded by 10 youths wearing hooded tops. The hoods were almost like a "uniform", he said. "I found that very alarming. I think the fact that you go around with these hats and these covers ... is intimidating."
Rachel Harrington, vice-chair of the British Youth Council, says Bluewater's decision demonstrates a growing demonisation of young people. "It's yet another example of a trend - tarring all young people with the same brush and overreacting to any behaviour by young people. You can understand shopping centres' desire to please their customers, but it doesn't seem to me to be the best response. It's very easy to create the stereotype of the young thug as emblematic of society's problems, rather than seek out the root of the problems."
Prejudice or not, our uneasiness towards hoods doesn't come from nowhere. Hooded figures are everywhere in art, literature, religion, cinema, cartoons - and most of them don't appear offering ice cream. The big daddy of them all, the Grim Reaper, comes cloaked and hooded, as do the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, various minions of Satan, and harbingers of evil from all creeds, religions, mythologies, science-fiction universes and fantastical worlds of dungeons and dragons. "Hooded figures" appear in crime reports, horror films, nightmares. The imminent Star Wars movie Revenge of the Sith shows Anakin Skywalker, in preparation for his crossing to the Dark Side, donning a cloak and hood in imitation of the trendsetting but evil Emperor. It's the Hooded Claw who imperils Penelope Pitstop. It's the Reaper-esque Ringwraiths who pursue Frodo in Lord of the Rings. It was a hood that led Donald Sutherland's John Baxter to unfortunately confuse a murderous dwarf with his drowned daughter in Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now. And if baddies don't have actual hoods, they have hooded eyes: peer into their darkness at your peril. For thousands of years, we have been bombarded with images of menacing hooded figures. Crabby youths wrapped in cotton/polyester-mix tops are just the latest entry in the catalogue of devils; they can't hold a candle to the Ku Klux Klan.
Of course, evil does not have a monopoly on the hood. For every Darth, there's an Obi-Wan Kenobi. For every Hooded Claw, there's a Little Red Riding Hood. But the good adopt a hood not to save them from extinction, but for the same reason they are so beloved by the bad: concealment. There's as much power in anonymity as there is in fame. Coldplay's Chris Martin recently revealed he has taken to wandering around London late at night with his hood up, to experience life as a regular person. "I look like a drug dealer. People don't think you're a pop star, so they treat you like they treat other people." More than that, you imagine they cross the road to avoid him.
The fashion designer Fee Doran designed the white hooded jumpsuit Kylie famously wore in her Can't Get You Out of My Head video. Her inspiration came from her years as a DJ. "I was known as the High Priestess of Funk. I used to wear this long purple robe with a hood I'd found in a charity shop; it must have belonged to a witch or someone really strange before me. Anyway, whenever I put the hood up, I felt different somehow. It's like putting a wig on, I suppose: you become a different person. There's mystery and intrigue. I always associate mystery with hoods. And I had just had a baby when I designed Kylie's outfit, so I guess I had mothers on my mind, but it was [the Virgin] Mary meets ... something. There's definitely something ethereal about that look. Plus, having the hood up kept her boobs in."
Angela McRobbie, professor of communications at Goldsmiths College, says it's the hoodie's promise of anonymity and mystery that both explains its appeal and provokes anxiety. "The point of origin is obviously black American hip-hop culture, now thoroughly mainstream and a key part of the global economy of music through Eminem and others. Leisure- and sportswear adopted for everyday wear suggests a distance from the world of office [suit] or school [uniform]. Rap culture celebrates defiance, as it narrates the experience of social exclusion. Musically and stylistically, it projects menace and danger as well as anger and rage. [The hooded top] is one in a long line of garments chosen by young people, usually boys, and inscribed with meanings suggesting that they are 'up to no good'. In the past, such appropriation was usually restricted to membership of specific youth cultures - leather jackets, bondage trousers - but nowadays it is the norm among young people to flag up their music and cultural preferences in this way, hence the adoption of the hoodie by boys across the boundaries of age, ethnicity and class."
McRobbie says Prescott's reaction to the hooded top will only have increased its popularity. "Moral panics of this type have only ever made the item, and its cultural environment, all the more attractive to those who prefer to disidentify with establishment figures and assorted 'moral guardians' and who enjoy the outlaw status of 'folk devil'."
Can the hoodie get any more popular? While it's the uniform of the yob, evoking shoplifter fashion and thug chic, isn't there at least one in everyone's wardrobe? Between them, Nike, Adidas and Gap - not known for its anarchic tendencies - sell millions. After all, says Kate Harrison, head of UK marketing for the label Carhartt, which sells 15,000 hooded tops a year, you can't go wrong with a good hoodie. "It's an ageless, unisex, all-weather basic. With a hoodie, there's no need to carry a jacket or an umbrella. It's all there, on your back."
Unlike the baseball boot and the polo shirt, it has no explicit connection to any one sport in particular, but it can safely be described as sportswear. It can perhaps more accurately be described as utilitywear, given its exceptional versatility. Or we can forget trying to describe it and just pull it on - for Saturday-morning supermarket trips and lazy Sunday pub lunches, for late-night corner-shop errands and jaunts to the seaside. Really, the hooded top is part of our national costume and, without doubt, widely available at Bluewater.
'They're good because they make you look anonymous'
Joshua Akim, 19, security guard
It's a load of rubbish saying that people wearing hoodies are more likely to do antisocial things, although they could act as a disguise. The ban is totally prejudiced, it's like saying you're a criminal because of the clothes you put on that morning. I just like my clothes to match, which is why I'm wearing this black hoodie today, to go with my black jeans, black hat and black shoes.
Flories de Vries, 17, on a school trip from Holland
Hoodies are good because they make you look anonymous, especially with the hood up. That said, I'm just wearing mine like that because I'm cold and I thought it was going to rain. It doesn't mean I'm going to do something antisocial.
Paul Standley, 38, market trader
I have a teensy-weensy idea where Bluewater and Prescott are coming from, but you shouldn't generalise from what people are wearing. Mostly, I think, it's just because oldies tend not to wear hoodies, though I'm getting on a bit - I've got three kids and my boy wears them too. I wear hoodies because they're practical and good for layering, and no one need know that I've not washed the tops I've got on underneath.
Shilpa Zacharia and Katy Walsh, second-year medical students from University College, London
Shilpa: I'm wearing a hoodie today because I'm revising for my exams and it's comfortable. It was just the first thing I grabbed before I left the house.
Katy: I'd never wear a hoodie if I was going anywhere other than Tesco's in case someone saw me. When you see people with the hoods pulled up they can look intimidating, but I always keep mine down. · Interviews by Helen Pidd
Is this just alarmist ?
[font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]It is the slouchy, unisex garment of choice for a generation. But who hasn't quickened their step when faced with an unknown figure wearing one? Now a shopping centre even wants to ban them. Gareth McLean on the meaning of the hoodie[/font]
[font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Friday May 13, 2005
The Guardian
[/font][font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Really, it's only a sweatshirt with an extra bit. And sometimes a zip. And possibly pockets. It is not made of chainmail, of Batman's offcuts, or of the very fabric of evil itself. Indeed, nowadays, you're lucky to get one that's 100% cotton. And yet, the hooded top can strike fear into the heart of even the most courageous among us. A lone figure behind us on the walk home - hood up, head down - and we quicken our steps. Someone solitary and hooded at the back of the bus, and we opt for a seat near the front. A group of hooded teenagers on the street, and we're tensing our shoulders, clenching our fists (round handbag strap or housekeys-cum- weapon), training our ears for verbal abuse in order to emphatically ignore it. Just as leather trenchcoats are associated with goths, Matrix fans and ageing lotharios, so the hoodie has become a signifier of disgruntled, malevolent youth, scowling and indolent. The hoodie is the uniform of the troublemaker: its wearer may as well be emblazoned with a scarlet letter .[/font]
For this reason, the managers of Bluewater shopping centre in Kent have drawn up a code of conduct for the centre - a dress code, if you will. Wearing clothing that obscures the face - hooded tops, baseball caps - will not be allowed. Those persevering with such anti-social, CCTV-foiling fashion choices will be asked to leave the mall. While there's a bigger argument to be had about the privatisation of public spaces and Bluewater's ability to enforce a dress code on its customers, it would not seem to be one John Prescott fancies engaging in. He told the BBC he welcomed Bluewater's decision, following an incident in a motorway cafe when he was surrounded by 10 youths wearing hooded tops. The hoods were almost like a "uniform", he said. "I found that very alarming. I think the fact that you go around with these hats and these covers ... is intimidating."
Rachel Harrington, vice-chair of the British Youth Council, says Bluewater's decision demonstrates a growing demonisation of young people. "It's yet another example of a trend - tarring all young people with the same brush and overreacting to any behaviour by young people. You can understand shopping centres' desire to please their customers, but it doesn't seem to me to be the best response. It's very easy to create the stereotype of the young thug as emblematic of society's problems, rather than seek out the root of the problems."
Prejudice or not, our uneasiness towards hoods doesn't come from nowhere. Hooded figures are everywhere in art, literature, religion, cinema, cartoons - and most of them don't appear offering ice cream. The big daddy of them all, the Grim Reaper, comes cloaked and hooded, as do the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, various minions of Satan, and harbingers of evil from all creeds, religions, mythologies, science-fiction universes and fantastical worlds of dungeons and dragons. "Hooded figures" appear in crime reports, horror films, nightmares. The imminent Star Wars movie Revenge of the Sith shows Anakin Skywalker, in preparation for his crossing to the Dark Side, donning a cloak and hood in imitation of the trendsetting but evil Emperor. It's the Hooded Claw who imperils Penelope Pitstop. It's the Reaper-esque Ringwraiths who pursue Frodo in Lord of the Rings. It was a hood that led Donald Sutherland's John Baxter to unfortunately confuse a murderous dwarf with his drowned daughter in Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now. And if baddies don't have actual hoods, they have hooded eyes: peer into their darkness at your peril. For thousands of years, we have been bombarded with images of menacing hooded figures. Crabby youths wrapped in cotton/polyester-mix tops are just the latest entry in the catalogue of devils; they can't hold a candle to the Ku Klux Klan.
Of course, evil does not have a monopoly on the hood. For every Darth, there's an Obi-Wan Kenobi. For every Hooded Claw, there's a Little Red Riding Hood. But the good adopt a hood not to save them from extinction, but for the same reason they are so beloved by the bad: concealment. There's as much power in anonymity as there is in fame. Coldplay's Chris Martin recently revealed he has taken to wandering around London late at night with his hood up, to experience life as a regular person. "I look like a drug dealer. People don't think you're a pop star, so they treat you like they treat other people." More than that, you imagine they cross the road to avoid him.
The fashion designer Fee Doran designed the white hooded jumpsuit Kylie famously wore in her Can't Get You Out of My Head video. Her inspiration came from her years as a DJ. "I was known as the High Priestess of Funk. I used to wear this long purple robe with a hood I'd found in a charity shop; it must have belonged to a witch or someone really strange before me. Anyway, whenever I put the hood up, I felt different somehow. It's like putting a wig on, I suppose: you become a different person. There's mystery and intrigue. I always associate mystery with hoods. And I had just had a baby when I designed Kylie's outfit, so I guess I had mothers on my mind, but it was [the Virgin] Mary meets ... something. There's definitely something ethereal about that look. Plus, having the hood up kept her boobs in."
Angela McRobbie, professor of communications at Goldsmiths College, says it's the hoodie's promise of anonymity and mystery that both explains its appeal and provokes anxiety. "The point of origin is obviously black American hip-hop culture, now thoroughly mainstream and a key part of the global economy of music through Eminem and others. Leisure- and sportswear adopted for everyday wear suggests a distance from the world of office [suit] or school [uniform]. Rap culture celebrates defiance, as it narrates the experience of social exclusion. Musically and stylistically, it projects menace and danger as well as anger and rage. [The hooded top] is one in a long line of garments chosen by young people, usually boys, and inscribed with meanings suggesting that they are 'up to no good'. In the past, such appropriation was usually restricted to membership of specific youth cultures - leather jackets, bondage trousers - but nowadays it is the norm among young people to flag up their music and cultural preferences in this way, hence the adoption of the hoodie by boys across the boundaries of age, ethnicity and class."
McRobbie says Prescott's reaction to the hooded top will only have increased its popularity. "Moral panics of this type have only ever made the item, and its cultural environment, all the more attractive to those who prefer to disidentify with establishment figures and assorted 'moral guardians' and who enjoy the outlaw status of 'folk devil'."
Can the hoodie get any more popular? While it's the uniform of the yob, evoking shoplifter fashion and thug chic, isn't there at least one in everyone's wardrobe? Between them, Nike, Adidas and Gap - not known for its anarchic tendencies - sell millions. After all, says Kate Harrison, head of UK marketing for the label Carhartt, which sells 15,000 hooded tops a year, you can't go wrong with a good hoodie. "It's an ageless, unisex, all-weather basic. With a hoodie, there's no need to carry a jacket or an umbrella. It's all there, on your back."
Unlike the baseball boot and the polo shirt, it has no explicit connection to any one sport in particular, but it can safely be described as sportswear. It can perhaps more accurately be described as utilitywear, given its exceptional versatility. Or we can forget trying to describe it and just pull it on - for Saturday-morning supermarket trips and lazy Sunday pub lunches, for late-night corner-shop errands and jaunts to the seaside. Really, the hooded top is part of our national costume and, without doubt, widely available at Bluewater.
'They're good because they make you look anonymous'
Joshua Akim, 19, security guard
It's a load of rubbish saying that people wearing hoodies are more likely to do antisocial things, although they could act as a disguise. The ban is totally prejudiced, it's like saying you're a criminal because of the clothes you put on that morning. I just like my clothes to match, which is why I'm wearing this black hoodie today, to go with my black jeans, black hat and black shoes.
Flories de Vries, 17, on a school trip from Holland
Hoodies are good because they make you look anonymous, especially with the hood up. That said, I'm just wearing mine like that because I'm cold and I thought it was going to rain. It doesn't mean I'm going to do something antisocial.
Paul Standley, 38, market trader
I have a teensy-weensy idea where Bluewater and Prescott are coming from, but you shouldn't generalise from what people are wearing. Mostly, I think, it's just because oldies tend not to wear hoodies, though I'm getting on a bit - I've got three kids and my boy wears them too. I wear hoodies because they're practical and good for layering, and no one need know that I've not washed the tops I've got on underneath.
Shilpa Zacharia and Katy Walsh, second-year medical students from University College, London
Shilpa: I'm wearing a hoodie today because I'm revising for my exams and it's comfortable. It was just the first thing I grabbed before I left the house.
Katy: I'd never wear a hoodie if I was going anywhere other than Tesco's in case someone saw me. When you see people with the hoods pulled up they can look intimidating, but I always keep mine down. · Interviews by Helen Pidd
Is this just alarmist ?
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