A hooded sweater. And that should be one of the most exciting things in fashion right now? But yes – because it’s from Kanye West. The rapper may be highly questionable if he’s serious about becoming President of the United States and embarrassingly snuggling up to Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Unfortunately, as a designer and fashion entrepreneur, he is brilliant. “The Perfect Hoodie” is the name of the model he presented a few months ago as part of his collaboration with The Gap. The hoodie was immediately sold out in the USA, but it’s not officially available in Europe yet. It should only be available here later this year. But that doesn’t stop fans of the rapper, fashion junkies and ambitious hipsters from ordering the item in all sorts of detours and having it delivered to Thiendorf in Saxony, Fulda or Bonn, and then bragging about it on Instagram and YouTube.
Like I said, it’s a hooded sweater. Without logo, without imprint. At first glance, it looks like a generic giveaway hoodie that tshirt-druck24.de quickly flocks with some advertising slogan. But then the design details catch the eye: The hood has no cord. It tapers to a point at the back of the head, almost like a monk’s habit. The double-layer cotton fabric is extra thick and super fluffy. It almost looks as if this hoodie was sewn from a weighted duvet, which is hyped everywhere right now, because you feel comfortably hugged by them and, freed from stress, anxiety and panic attacks, you sleep wonderfully well. So you wrap yourself up in an ultra-soft way and at the same time appear a bit to the outside world tough: The Perfect Hoodie drives the dichotomy that has always made hoodie fashion fascinating – soft on the inside, gangster on the outside? -, on top. But is it really the perfect hoodie?
The Design Museum in Rotterdam dedicated an entire exhibition to the hoodie
Only hoodie science can answer that question. It has been one of the most interesting fashion sciences ever for a while. This was demonstrated, among other things, by the exhibition “The Hoodie” in the design museum Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam two years ago. She traced very precisely and multifaceted which historical hoods preceded today’s hoodies. There were the chain mail hoods that knights wore to protect their heads from swords. There were the long hoods of the cowls. In the late 18th century, women protected their expansive tower hairstyles, called poufs, from wind and weather with absurdly large calash hoods, some of which were even strengthened from the inside with whalebone.
In the 1930s – we are slowly approaching Kanye West again – the American sportswear company Champion came up with the idea of combining a cotton sweater with a hood. It was supposed to keep the athletes on the sports teams at the elite white universities on the east coast of the USA from getting cold during training. Black hip-hop culture adopted this garment in the 1970s. Rappers and b-boys wore hoodies with sneakers. White middle-class high school students soon followed suit. They also wanted to be cool. From here it’s not far to Mark Zuckerberg. In 2007, at the age of 22, he sat on the cover of Tech Magazine in jeans and a hoodie Fast Company and laughed. The headline: “The kid who turned down a billion dollars”. At the time, the Facebook founder had just rejected the takeover bids from Yahoo and Viacom. You could hardly believe it.
Robert Habeck has also worn it. But only for public consultations
Yes, the ostentatious casualness of the Silicon Valley generation is also expressed in the wardrobe and still causes irritation today. Not only when senior editors at the newspaper suddenly take part in the morning conference in hoods, but also when freshly graduated business students exchange ideas in online forums about which hoodie would be the right one for starting a career at the renowned strategy consulting firm: Supreme , Stone Island, or Givenchy? Answer: “Moncler Genius too.”
Suit and tie the same old world, skepticism about digitization, rigid hierarchies. Hoodie and sneakers equal New Economy, flatter hierarchies, digital neoliberalism in all its splendor and ugliness. Hardly any item of clothing symbolizes this shift as much as the hoodie. Funnily enough, he has not yet been able to assert himself in politics. Even if Robert Habeck, as Vice-Chancellor, has already worn one to some citizens’ consultation hours. Under the jacket.
But now really back to Kanye West: With his Perfect Hoodie, he intends to help the hoodie to what the American talk show master Oprah Winfrey describes as a “full circle moment” after decades of its pop culture appreciation and entry into the executive floors and luxury boutiques would: The circle should close, but at the same time it should be an aha moment that makes it clear that not everything is the same as before. In other words: the hoodie should become a basic again, a piece of clothing for everyone, but this time with the finesse and quality standards of a real high-fashion item. $90 might be a lot if you’re used to paying $50 for a standard Gap hoodie (with a huge, ugly logo and poor cotton quality). But it’s not much if you somehow found it plausible that a Bottega Veneta hoodie costs 1,300 euros.
Whereby the Perfect Hoodie is somehow oddly cut. The arms are very long and wide, but the torso is shortened, in technical terms that means cropped. If you wanted to wear it more body-hugging and order one size smaller, it would be cropped. This boxy seat, called boxy fit, is very popular right now, it not only broadens your shoulders, but also hides one or two rolls of fat that may have migrated to your hips in connection with the pandemic. From this point of view, the hoodie is perfect, at least for this moment.