Hoodies? Yes, They’re Political
+ the hoodie as an identity marker, Met Gala chit chat, fashion as art and more
Hey, hi, hello! Welcome back to Fashion Tingz.
My introvert self can’t quite believe I’m typing this, but this week I went out to two different IRL activities, both fashion-related, and both have ties to this very newsletter. I’m constantly being reminded of the power of being offline.
First up, I went to the miista sample sale in London. This wasn’t my first sample sale rodeo, and I’m sure it won’t be my last… what can I say? I’ve been working in fashion for over a decade now, my thoughts on all that here.
Second, I went to a Dr. Martens launch event at the good old London institution, Towpath Cafe, to have an alfresco lunch riverside and round off the week in high spirits. Good vibes and good people.
— J’Nae xoxo
IN THIS EDITION: Hoodies have transcended their humble beginnings into a garment loaded with meaning. The Met Gala had folks at odds in the comments. A.P.C. names Ludivine Poiblanc artistic director. K-pop star G-Dragon wore a shirt with a racial slur at a concert. Alysa Liu is a Vuitton brand ambassador.
I’m a hoodie girl through and through. Slight chill in the air? I’m grabbing a hoodie. Heading out on errands? I’ll throw on a hoodie. Attending IRL meetings? I’ll pair a hoodie with boots or loafers, keeping it business casual and cutesy. So when I saw this post from Justin Frett on TikTok on MLK Day earlier this year, it made me do a double-take and pause for a hot minute to collect my thoughts. It’s been sitting with me ever since. I finally took the time to put pen to paper (metaphorically speaking) about the politics of the hoodie, its cultural significance, deeper implications, and its overlap with identity. And in case you’re wondering, yes, it really is that deep.
Once the hood goes up, everything changes. It’s the smallest gesture when you think about it: a cotton arc pulled over the head and a shadow cast across the brow. Comfort, anonymity, defiance, all zipped into one. The hoodie, in a literal sense, is just a sweatshirt with a hood, and yet it’s carried more cultural freight than most garments hanging in museum archives. It’s soft fleece, but hard politics.
The modern hoodie traces back to the 1930s, when the Knickerbocker Knitting Company (which later became Champion) began producing hooded sweatshirts for athletes to wear between game time and practice sessions. It was pragmatic, utilitarian, and anti-glamour. The hood was performance protection, not social scrutiny. But clothing rarely stays in its intended lane. By the 1970s and ’80s, the hoodie had migrated from workwear to the streets, becoming synonymous with hip-hop culture and downtown skate scenes. When Run-DMC performed in athletic gear and unlaced sneakers, or when skaters carved through cities in oversized sweats, the hoodie became more about identity. Queue the moral panic.
Few garments have been policed as aggressively as the hoodie. On some bodies, it barely registers thinking about. On others, it reads as criminal. The tragic killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 cemented the hoodie as a flashpoint in conversations about race, surveillance, and suspicion. A teenager in a hoodie carrying candy was perceived as a threat. The garment became shorthand for the ways society projects fear onto Black bodies, which isn’t a surprise to those of us from the diaspora. In response, protesters wore hoodies to marches. It was a symbol, an act of sartorial solidarity, a reclaiming of the narrative.
Contrast that with Mark Zuckerberg, who built a multibillion-dollar tech empire in a rotation of grey hoodies. On him, the hoodie signalled focus, anti-fashion efficiency, a Silicon Valley rejection of corporate tailoring. When he wore it, it was interpreted as genius minimalism. When others wear it, it can be read as a menace. Same garment, radically different assumptions. This is the politics of the hoodie: who is allowed comfort without consequence?
Schools have banned hoodies for being “intimidating.” Shopping centres have enforced no-hood policies in the name of security. These things do make sense, and they have their time and place. Meanwhile, luxury boutiques sell hoodies for four figures under glowing lights. The policing of the hoodie reveals how deeply we read clothing as biography. We see a hood up and fill in the blanks — class, race, intention, danger — often without realising we’re doing it. And yet, as society debates the hoodie’s respectability, fashion was busy canonising it.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, labels like Supreme turned the hoodie into a hype commodity, its box logo becoming a wearable status symbol. Soon, luxury houses followed. Balenciaga sent exaggerated, slouchy hoodies down the runway, sleeves swallowing hands, hems grazing thighs. Vetements built an entire aesthetic around the subversive elevation of everyday basics, hoodies included, often emblazoned with ironic slogans. What was once practical became conceptual, and what was once suspicious became a flex.
The mental imagery is striking, completely at odds with the conception of the modern hoodie and its relation to class dynamics. We now get paparazzi shots of celebrities wearing £1000 hoodies that look suspiciously like the ones teenagers are reprimanded for wearing in certain neighbourhoods. Street style photographers treat hooded silhouettes as major moments, flocking to fashion show attendees who don high-end hoodie swag. The hood, once associated with anonymity, has become the focal point.
It doesn’t stop there. The hoodie has infiltrated couture-adjacent spaces, styled under tailored coats, layered with crystal chokers and such. A garment that once symbolised anti-establishment cool is now front row at fashion month, taking prime spot in glossy advertorials. Even political leaders and activists have deployed it strategically, understanding its visual shorthand. So where does this leave us?
We’re judgmental about hoodies because they obscure. The hood partially hides the face, and in a culture obsessed with visibility and transparency, that reads as refusal. Refusal to be fully legible, and the refusal to perform approachability. We’re unsettled by what we cannot immediately categorise, and I get it. But we categorise anyway. That reflex says more about us than the garment in question.
Today, the hoodie transcends subculture. Is it gym wear or airport uniform? Is it tech bro armour or a Gen Z thrift staple? Can it be high-end cashmere at The Row and logo-heavy streetwear at a skate shop? Hoodies are worn by activists, by rappers, by billionaires, by teenagers walking home from school. It’s both hyper-visible and deeply personal, depending on who’s wearing it.
The hoodie’s journey from warehouse staple to counter-culture badge to luxury cornerstone maps the evolution of modern fashion itself. High and low have collapsed. Street has swallowed couture. Comfort has challenged formality. But the social baggage lingers, persistent in our subconscious. A £1,200 hoodie in a boutique may be celebrated as minimalist chic, while a £20 one on the “wrong” person can still trigger suspicion.
So yes, hoodies are political. Not because cotton fleece carries ideology, but because we project ideology onto cotton fleece. We decide whose comfort is threatening and whose is visionary. We decide whose hood is hiding something and whose is simply part of the look. The next time someone pulls their hood up, notice your instinct. Do you read danger? Style? Genius? The hoodie hasn’t changed much since the 1930s; it’s us that’s changed.
The Met Gala arrived under the banner “Fashion Is Art,” though by night’s end, it felt more like a performance about capitalism itself. It read like a couture circus teetering between brilliance and self-parody, underwritten by Jeff and Lauren Bezos to the tune of a reported $10 million. Outside the museum, protests, anti-billionaire projections on Bezos’s penthouse, and even hidden bottles of fake urine turned Manhattan into its own guerrilla installation, while union organisers staged a “Ball Without Billionaires” to remind everyone that fashion’s real workforce rarely sees the inside of the gala. Activist Chris Smalls was violently detained while protesting Bezos. In contrast, Mayor Mamdani’s office spotlighted six local fashion workers advocating for a better New York, and Aariana Rose Philip made history as the first wheelchair user to attend the Met Gala — two reminders that substance still wears better than spectacle. And let’s give credit where credits due, assistants work their asses off, and they deserve their flowers.
A new chapter is unfolding at A.P.C. as Ludivine Poiblanc is named artistic director. The stylist and creative director is known for shaping the pages of WSJ Mag and quietly refining luxury brands’ visual identities. Her mandate: to reimagine APC’s “image and visual universe.” The move marks the latest evolution for the famously understated house, three years after its ownership shake-up signalled it was time for a rebrand.
For nearly four decades, Janet Werner has been sabotaging fashion’s polished fantasies with a paintbrush, transforming vintage campaign imagery into warped, uncanny portraits. Her latest series, Landscape with Legs, arrives just as fashion slips back into its early-2000s obsessions — ultra-thin bodies, nostalgic excess, and the familiar choreography of being looked at. Werner’s distorted figures expose how desire and power are baked into the image itself, asking whether visibility in fashion has ever really belonged to the person being seen.
At a May 2 performance in Macau, K-pop megastar G-Dragon wore a shirt with a racial slur and a caricature of a Black person on the front. The idol appeared onstage wearing said shirt, which had the n word in Dutch written on it, in the year that is 2026, only for fans to uncover footage showing he’d worn the same design nearly two decades earlier. At this point, who’s surprised? What may once have been dismissed as “edgy” now reads as a case study in how fashion can preserve cultural blind spots as faithfully as it preserves trends. After backlash spread online, his agency, Galaxy Corporation, issued a public apology on May 3. There’s honestly no excuse for this, do better already.
Alysa Liu is now firmly in fashion’s grasp as the Olympic gold medalist has been named Louis Vuitton’s newest brand ambassador. Her charm and Gen Z ease have made figure skating feel less like pageantry and more like personality, and we love to see it. The partnership follows her appearance at Nicolas Ghesquière’s Fall 2026 show during Paris Fashion Week, further proving that luxury's current obsession isn’t polished perfection so much as people who dictate the zeitgeist.
Kering has made it clear that Alexander McQueen is scaling down; half of its global stores are set to disappear by the end of 2026. In presentations to Italian unions, management described 2022–2025 as nothing short of an “emergency situation,” with revenues plunging 60% —a reminder that even fashion houses built on spectacle are not immune to gravity. The remedy, executives insist, is a return to luxury’s holy trinity: creativity, desirability, and uncompromising product excellence.
The city of Huron has officially declared May 3rd “Willy Chavarria Day” — proof that the designer’s influence now extends well beyond the runway. Honoured for his impact on fashion, art, and culture at large, Chavarria marked the moment not with a victory lap, but with a homecoming. While developing his Spring 2026 collection, he drove back to Huron to shoot a short film, marking his first return in nearly two decades. It’s a reminder that before fashion crowns you a visionary, your hometown still remembers you as the kid who left.
This was a great read, thanks for your writing!