Used by many of us as an essential part of an everyday casual uniform, as comfortable as pyjamas, yet more suitable to wear than the latter while working around the house or during a quick run to the shops, hooded sweatshirts - hoodies in short - have turned in the past few years into a versatile wardrobe staple.
Immortalised by hip hop artists in tracks, turned into must-have items by luxury houses collaborating with painfully hip streetwear brands, in basic monochromatic and monastic neutral shades, digitally-printed in bold and bright patterns or maybe sporting a political slogan or the logo of you favourite brand, the hoodie has been the undiscussed protagonist of the last few decades.
This humble garment is currently the subject of a recently opened exhibition at Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, The Netherlands (Museumpark 25, through April 12th, 2020).
Curator Lou Stoppard looks at the garment's origins established around the '30s, when Champion Athletic Apparel started producing hoodies to keep football players warm on the sidelines. Soon the garment became a practical solution for workmen as well.
Yet the exhibition is not a chronological journey through the decades that saw the rise of the hoodie, but it is more a way to stop and think about the implications behind the hoodie and the dualities behind this garment.
Superficially speaking, hoodies may be considered as great levellers as people of all ages and from all walks of life wear them - yet they are also seen as symbols of moral panic.
A trademark uniform for juvenile delinquents causing havoc in the streets and in shopping malls, who seem intent on collecting ASBOS (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders), hoodies have come to represent rebellion, aggression and a widespread modern social malaise.
Shopping centres in different countries banned the wearing of hooded sweatshirts or established hoodie-free zones, asking customers to remove their hoods upon entry.
In 2006 the then UK Prime Minister David Cameron, tried to show empathy, stating: "Hoodies are more defensive than offensive. They're a way to stay invisible in the street. In a dangerous environment the best thing to do is keep your head down, blend in. For some the hoodie represents all that's wrong about youth culture in Britain today. For me, adult society's response to the hoodie shows how far we are from finding the long-term answers to put things right."
Cameron's words, followed by no proper efforts for real change, entered history as the "Hug a hoodie" speech, but his personal relation with "hoodies" developed further when, while visiting a housing estate in Manchester the following year, a young man in a hoodie pretended to shoot him with his fingers.
The incident is recalled in the exhibition that includes a wide range of designs, from sporty ones to more trendy versions by Rick Owens, Off-White, Vêtements and Craig Green among the others, accompanied by works by artists such as David Hammons, Sasha Huber, Lucy and Jorge Orta and Thorsten Brinkmann, plus specially commissioned installations by Angelica Falkeling and Bogomir Doringer.
While the former looks through her installation at cotton production and the amount of hoodies manufactured every year, the latter explores the presence of masked faces in art and examines issues of privacy.
The fact that the hoodie has turned into a popular garment, but also into a container of modern anxieties, is probably to be attributed to collective paranoia spawned by technology. We are indeed all being watched by millions of closed-circuit television cameras, and the hoodie is a way to hide, a reaction against surveillance culture.
In a way it is a mask, similar to the Venetian 1700s "bauta", that was considered as a proper outfit rather than just a costume and conceived as a transformative tool. All sorts of people could wear the "bauta", with no distinctions of social classes or sex, and the disguise guaranteed maximum freedom and anonymity.
Yet the hoodie also hides some dangerous dichotomies: favoured by people in tech who may prefer anonymity such as hackers, it has become the uniform of a younger and powerful high-tech generation that has refused suits, but doesn't refuse the concept of making money by exploiting other people (think about young tech multi-billionaires like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg).
Last, but not least, while in some cases hoodies make people invisible, in others they actually make wearers more visible or even suspicious.
Hoodies can indeed be studied in connection with racist stereotypes, when you think about the stories of black men harassed by the authorities for wearing the garment, or victims of tragedies like 17-year-old African-American teenager Trayvon Martin, who was wearing a hoodie when he was shot in Miami in 2012 by a member of a community watch.
People responded to the murder with the Million Hoodie March in Union Square, Manhattan, that retrasformed back the hoodie from a symbol of discrimination into one of protest, resistance and resilience.
The stigmatisation of black men in hoodies also inspired in 2019 the campaign "56 Black Men", featuring photographs of black men from all walks of life in hoodies, a project that prompted people to look not at the hood per se, but at what's underneath it.
So while looking at the hoods on display in the neutral and blank urban space recreated in the museum - designed to reflect the versatile hoodie - you realise there are a lot of themes to take in here, from youth culture and subculture to police brutality, racism and privacy, without forgetting social inequality through the images of Lucy and Jorge Orta and their portable shelters or "habitats".
Hoping to make the exhbition "portable", the museum is drafting with design practice and cultural platform Concrete Blossom an off-site programme that will develop around Rotterdam's various neighbourhoods and will focus on grassroots initiatives by makers and consumers of culture.
This side programme will complement the main event, inviting visitors to consider how the hoodie - be it basic and cheap or trendy and expensive - is a a powerful social and cultural signifier because its meaning changes according to gender, geography, age, conduct and ethnicity of the wearer.
So this is not your average fashion exhibit in which you stand in front of grand gowns and dream about them, but it is more a cultural event that prompts you to ponder about the wider connections (think about bans regarding hoodies in connection with The Netherlands' recent burqa ban) and implications behind a garment permanently trapped in a dichotomic state, being rebellious and normal, providing privacy, shelter, gender neutrality, anonymity and invisibility, but also triggering fear, anxiety and aggression.
There's a a final catharsis in a corner of the museum, a hoodie by Devan Shimoyama covered with flowers that seem to have grown out of its fabric. It is a tribute to Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old Black teenager who was wearing a hoodie when he was fatally shot by George Zimmerman in 2012.
In this case the hoodie becomes a symbol, a sort of wearable memorial, telling us that even a hoodie can blossom, mutating from signifier of transgression into a delicately fragile garment with the power of changing visitors' perceptions towards this item of clothing.
For those who decide instead to change attitude before they even get in the exhibition, there is an extra surprise right at the entrance of the museum: anyone who wears a hoodie to see the show will be given access free of charge.
Image credits for this post
1. Model Adut Akech wears Balenciaga in i-D's The Earthwise Issue, Fall 2018. Photograph: Campbell Addy. Styling: Alastair McKimm
2. Exactitudes 168. by Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek - EUnify hoodie by Souvenir Official
3. John Edmonds, Untitled (Hood 13), 2018
4. Lucy + Jorge Orta - Refuge Wear Intervention, London East End 1998. Photo credit: John Akehurst
5- 11 and 13-19. Installation views "The Hoodie", 2019. Photo credit: Petra van der Ree.
12. Prem Sahib, Umbra, 2019. Photo: Plastiques. Courtesy the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary.
20. Devan Shimoyama. February II, 2019.
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