The Hoodie As 21st Century Cultural Artifact
Not long into Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller North by Northwest, a bemused Roger Thornhill exclaims his derision when he finds all the suits in his hotel are tailored to a, “much shorter man”. Thornhill, played by an affable Cary Grant, accepts his new mistaken identity as George Kaplan, setting upon a deadly chase for the truth. By facing homicidal forces and unseen agencies, Thornhill becomes his alter-ego, successfully achieving salvation through counter-conspiracy and twists of fate. But what would it be like to lose one’s identity, every day?
Identity and clothing typically indicate the relative social coordinates of a person’s standing within the topography of class. 700 years ago, fashion emerged in Europe as a sign of social or cultural affinity. The nuances of class hierarchies are literally sewn into the fabric of a citizen’s attire. As Katalin Medvedev explains, “Dress was capable of signifying one’s culture, propriety, moral standards, economic status, and social power, and so it became a powerful tool to negotiate and structure social relations as well as to enforce class differences.”[1] Fashion, whose value arrives mostly from symbolic or cultural distinction, typically arises from developing excess capital.[2] By carefully restricting their subjects spending through so-called sumptuary laws, monarchies controlled their presentation.[3] As a more literate, skilled and therefore wealthy population developed in Europe, sumptuary laws abated, but their use targeted the restraint of common access to those goods associated with the affluent. The Encyclopedia of Fashion illustrates this shift:
“Judging from the explosion of sumptuary laws passed during these years, European rulers thought it was very important to keep common people from consuming the clothes and other luxury goods enjoyed by the wealthiest classes. The higher classes were threatened because merchants and skilled workers had more income than ever before and found that by purchasing certain clothes they could appear wealthier than they were. Rulers and nobles wanted to keep social distinctions clear, and they used sumptuary laws to do so.”
Fashion in 20th century tells a complex tale indelibly connected to class structure and the control of capital. Ubiquity of dress concealed distinctions between class and race in the first half of 20th century America. This de rigueur costuming of the masses in the 1950s evolved somewhat from a parsimony and formality indicative of the immediate post-war era. However, the social upheaval of the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements of the 1950s and 60s established both the symbolic and semiotic attributes of fashion and its potential as cultural artifact resonating with political power. As Henry Navarro Delgado summarizes:
“The political dimension of clothing is intuitively understood from the moment individuals are born. Because essentially, human society equals dressed society. What one wears, how one wears it and when one wears it constitutes expressions of degrees of social freedoms and influences.”[4]
The qualities of cloth mirror society’s hierarchical structures and the threads that either fray or unite citizens portend the reception of clothing as contextual political object. As Saussure’s bilateral concept of language assumes, the signification of the object relies on signifier, or more appropriately, those with enough physical or cultural power to determine the universal meaning of an object. Winston Churchill famously wore boiler-suits in public not solely because of their utility but to imbue them with the ostensible qualities of fortitude, resilience and commonality, parallel to the national attributes of Britain. Likewise, as African-American activists in the 60s affected structural change in America’s institutions, fashion subcultures emerged reflecting the attitudes either promoted, adopted or applied to each group.
Clothing and fashion indicate a unique bond between identity and culture in African-American history. Those centers of moral agency within the black community, from church to protest, pulpit and pavement, maintain a prodigious influence on the representations of individuality.[5] As European colonialism receded into a post-colonial era of African sovereignty, increasing numbers of Black Americans incorporated indigenous patterns and designs into their collective wardrobe. As an homage to partisan and resistance fighters in Europe throughout World War II, the Black Panther Party, formed in 1965, adopted the style of their perceived embattled brethren.[6]
The deployment of specific items of clothing by Black Americans to signify discontent extends well into the 21st Century. Contemporary fashion and identity politics exist conjointly within the sphere of public discourse. No one cultural artifact symbolizes the politicizing and commodification of black identity the hoodie. The ubiquity of this item of clothing simultaneously indicates its pragmatism and also its location as cultural object. The athletic attire manufacturer Champion first commissioned the hoodie in the 1930s as a layer of protection for winter workers.[7]
Like the banal outfits of the Black activists of the 1960s, the symbolic identification of ‘hoodie’ resided within the cultivated attitudes of the larger populace. Though unassuming in form, “the hoodie sparks a range of emotions, communicating many social and cultural ideas and nuances depending on the gender, geography, age, conduct and ethnicity of the wearer and the prejudices and politics of the viewer”.[8] The hoodie’s association with Black America began ostensibly during the 1990s. From the late 1980s onward, the number of Black athletes in American sports increased nominally, but their endorsement deals with major fashion brands like Nike, Adidas and others exploded.[9] Fashion houses began to structurally link athletic attire and black identity with commodity and capital. The parallel proliferation of Hip-Hop music increasingly characterized artists as hoodie-wearing symbols of power and money.[10]
In the late 2010s, the symbolic representations of Black wearers of the hoodie signified something altogether more deadly than self-empowerment. As social media grew to the dominant form of digital interaction, the meaning of the hoodie faced a violent adjudication by the court of public opinion. The Trayvon Martin case foregrounded the signification of cultural objects in America. His death also illuminated the issues of the hoodie as ubiquitous symbol in an age of renewed social unrest. These problems involve three distinct sociological phenomena, one of language, another of context and ultimately, one of capital.
The notion that language shapes our perception of things in an ‘active’ linguistic relativism (Sapir-Worf Theory) continues to be debated without unanimity. However, Gerbner’s studies on conditioned responses makes the possibility for a cultural object to maintain oppositional meanings a reality of daily life. Whether the hoodie represents anything other than cloth and stitch lies within the observer and their biases. The term hoodie evokes separate things for different people, but the term has concrete linguistic origins to speech associated with both Black America and crime. Police used the word ‘hood’ euphemistically in late the 19th century to indicate a criminal, principally engaged in, “violence against Chinese immigrants”.[11]
Early in its lexical history, the term linked race with violence. Hoodlum was abbreviated to ‘hood’, a synonym of ‘gangster’ in the 1930s, and eventually morphed into the distinctive slang of Black urban areas, or ‘hoods’, shortened from neighborhoods, in the second half of the 20th century.[12] As news media proliferated during the same period, the visual representation of Black America grew. But as Angela Davis writes, “the unprecedented contemporary circulation of photographic and filmic images of African Americans has multiple and contradictory implications…many of these…are being recycled and recontextualized in ways that are at once exciting and disturbing.”
An object’s existence as a sign or symbol is something often taken for granted in a post-modern society. The business of capitalism relies on group identification and harmony with the symbolic nature of production through marketing. Though the hoodie’s design employs anonymity as functional benefit, it does little to conceal or ameliorate the wearer’s position in society. This is why the hoodie can maintain various meanings. A foundational reading of modern psychology depends on what Jacques Lacan called mirroring ourselves against another. This distinguishing between self-identity and opposites also supports Husserl’s phenomenological sense of ‘otherness’. Stated succinctly, “the condition of otherness is a person’s non-conformity to and with the social norms of the surroundings. The Others are alienated from the center of society, and are placed at the societal margin for being the Other”.[13] Simone de Beauvoir supplies a model by which minorities in society ‘other’. In her seminal work The Second Sex, Beauvoir explicates the development of the woman as political being, detailing that female inclusion in labor and reproductive freedom lead to their emancipation from the oppression of patriarchy.[14]
Parallel to the demographic shift termed ‘the Great Divergence’, Black labor proliferated throughout the 20th century, as increasing numbers of African Americans entered the workforce. In 1900, the majority of Black workers were unskilled laborers or farm-hands, with nearly nine times as many professional Black workers in 1990 than at the turn of the century. However, White skilled or professional labor still outnumbers both Black male and female workers.[15] The problem of race in America is one of capital, and those who control capital often determine the meanings of products.
Whether through deliberate marketing or maintenance of structural biases through a system of signs and symbols, the cultural capital of the hoodie emanates from a bipolar position. The vast majority of major fashion brands are in Europe or owned and operated by Caucasians, from Burberry to Versace, Gucci, Nike, Adidas and even Apple. Those who model these fashions are also mostly white.[16] Yet the hoodie obviously implies a quality of ‘blackness’ for some. The way the hoodie is depicted in screen media echoes the incongruous racial underpinnings of its meaning as cultural artifact. Nearly every image online of a Caucasian wearer of a hoodie invokes those qualities associated with moral or mental aptitude. Seldom are Caucasians dressed solely in a hoodie and they come with the accoutrements of business or study, such as leather brief cases, bikes, laptop computers or even a cup of coffee. CEOs of major businesses like Mark Zuckerberg don the apparel, illuminated by giant screens full of the future of digital enterprise like a vision from Orwell’s ‘1984’.
Images of African-American’s wearing the hoodie are cast in solitary moments, isolated from any sense of power or object of capital. If they are framed in a group, it is often within a violent subtext. As Troy Patterson says,
“The electric charge of the isolated image — which provokes a flinch away from thought, a desire to evade the issue by moving on to check the sizing guide — attests to a consciousness of the hoodie’s recent history of peculiar reception. 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.”
All those tropes used in filmic depictions of criminals or fear also follow Black wearers of the hoodie in screen media. In lieu of comfort, ubiquity and the hard capital that generated the hoodie, darkness, uncertainty and malevolence haunts the African-American hoodie wearer.
Beyond the connotations of criminality, poverty and violence following it, the ‘black hoodie’ also represents the danger of the masked and the terror of the anonymous domestic terrorist cultivated by political hierarchies in America. Shortly after his inauguration, Donald Trump enlisted the FBI to report on so-called ‘Black Identity Extremists’. The report was, “part of the bureau’s Counterterrorism Division, and was distributed to scores of local and federal law enforcement partners across the country.”[17] This measure set a tone for the administration’s inversion of Black identity politics into acts of denounced domestic terrorism which threatened the very fabric of the nation’s democracy. In 2020 the federal repudiation of the Black Lives Matter movement continues both the mainstream political castigation of Black identity and affirms historical biases against African-American empowerment.
A new generation of artists and fashion designers aim to control the meaning behind those cultural objects associated with ‘blackness’ in America. By contextualizing historical events like the deaths of Martin, Floyd, Taylor and Prude into a concrete political specificity, activists aim to eschew alternate readings through the physical detritus of these events. Tania Bruguera is one of many artists aiming to defeat the trend of politicians re-contextualizing these moments to their own solipsistic advantage. As Claire Bishop describes:
“…political timing specificity is a response less to art than to the conventional forms and gestures of political activism: a fist in the air, a demonstrator holding a placard, people assembling for a march or a sit-in. Bruguera points out that those in power have developed counterstrategies for this kind of protest. (Politicians don’t show up to their offices during a demonstration, for example, or they claim that the demonstrators were paid.) For Bruguera, activism needs to operate in less predictable ways — and this is where the idea of political timing comes in.”[18]
Problems exist within the framework of political timing specificity. By identifying moments of ‘otherness’ away from the gaze of the mainstream, its explication increasing depends upon more nuanced and esoteric information.[19] Perhaps the greatest change to the political readings of the cultural artifacts of ‘otherness’ arrives through the shift of the control of capital. Black business leaders and designers merge to amplify the viability of African-American capital. Websites like Shoppe Black and Black Owned also signal the visibility of this capital and highlight prejudicial ad campaigns from the major fashion houses. These ads whose tropes prey upon archaic racial paradigms, are often ejected into the immediate past through intense social media redresses assigning culpability to misinterpretations.[20] In her explorations of society, the self and the ‘other’, de Beauvoir offers an avenue for unity, in that, “though [one] can neither act for another nor directly influence their freedom, [one] must…accept responsibility for the fact that…actions produce the conditions within which the other acts.” At a time when affable relations between Caucasians and African-Americans are at a quarter-century nadir, the French Philosopher’s path may be the most prudent.[21]
[1] Medvedev, Katalin. “Social Class and Clothing.” Beauty and Fashion, 2020. https://fashion-history.lovetoknow.com/fashion-history-eras/social-class-clothing.
[2] Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Field of Cultural Production.” Columbia University Press 1993.
[3] Encyclopedia Britannica. “Sumptuary law.” Encyclopedia Britannica Online, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/topic/sumptuary-law.
[4] Delgado, Henry Navarro. “Fashion’s Potential to Influence Politics and Culture.” The Conversation, January 22, 2018. Ryerson University. https://theconversation.com/fashions-potential-to-influence-politics-and-culture-90077.
[5] James, Daniel. “An Illustrative Identity of Fashion and Style Throughout African-American History and Movements.” Huffpost, February 10, 2015. Accessed September 8, 2020. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-illustrative-identity_b_6519244.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Iffley Road. “A Brief History of the Hoodie.” https://www.iffleyroad.com/blogs/journal/a-brief-history-of-the-hoodie
[8] Stoppard, Lou. “The Hoodie.” Exhibition at Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2019–2020. https://thehoodie.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en.
[9] Holland, Jesse J. “Black Athletes in the 1980s, 90s Not Outspoken, But Not Silent.” Associated Press News, February 16, 2018. https://apnews.com/3753fab5175343e09a12d85c718c008c/Black-athletes-in-1980s,-90s-not-outspoken,-but-not-silent.
[10] Wilson, Denis. “The History of the Hoodie: How the hooded sweatshirt evolved from a worker’s utility to the outlaw at the center of the Trayvon Martin case.” Rolling Stone April 3, 2012. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-history-of-the-hoodie-237791/.
[11] Honig, Mike. “’Hoodlum, Hood, Hoodie: A Bit of Etymology.” Thinkwing Radio, 2012. https://thinkwingradio.com/2012/04/02/hoodlum-hood-hoodie-a-bit-of-etymology.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Bell, Emily, Pinner, Sophie. “Otherness: The Alienation of Others in Relation Waiting for the Barbarians.” Global Literatures. Word Press January 28, 2016. https://globalliteratures.wordpress.com/2016/01/28/otherness-the-alienation-of-others-in-relation-to-waiting-for-the-barbarians/.
[14] De Beauvoir, Simone. “The Second Sex.” 1949. Vintage Books, Random House Publishing New York, NY, 2011.
[15] Maloney, Thomas N. “African Americans in The Twentieth Century.” Economic History Association, EH.net. https://eh.net/encyclopedia/african-americans-in-the-twentieth-century/.
[16] Elan, Priya. “Survey finds that 78% of models in fashion adverts are white.” The Guardian UK May 10, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2016/may/10/survey-finds-that-78-of-models-in-fashion-adverts-are-white.
[17] Speri, Alice. “The Threat Within.” The Intercept March 23, 2019. https://theintercept.com/2019/03/23/black-identity-extremist-fbi-domestic-terrorism/
[18] Bishop, Claire. “Rise to The Occasion: The Art of Political Timing.” Artforum May, 2019.
https://www.artforum.com/print/201905/claire-bishop-on-the-art-of-political-timing-79512
[19] Ibid.
[20] “Black Owned Luxury Brands to Support Instead of Gucci and Prada.” Shoppe Black February 9, 2019. https://shoppeblack.us/2019/02/19-black-owned-luxury-brands-to-support-instead-of-gucci-and-prada/.
[21] “Americans’ View of Black-White Race Relations Hits a 20-Year Low.” The Economist September 8, 2020. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/09/08/americans-view-of-black-white-race-relations-hits-a-20-year-low.
