What’s the point of a hoodie?

Hacking the source code of a surprisingly vexing staple

Feb 18, 2025

Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane.

Our new Home Goods Report, bursting with things to enliven the place you live, is here.

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The B.L.I.S.S. List — a helpful rundown of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples, from incense to sweatpants to underwear — is here.

I. Hoodies are hard

You don’t need me (Jonah) to tell you that A Great Hoodie is Hard to Find. As with the humble t-shirt, a hoodie is a putative “basic” that — when you start paying any sustained attention to how you like to look and feel in clothes — turns out to be anything but simple…

Smooth-brained ignoramuses think that by copping a hoodie they are making a safe non-choice. But Mach 3+ clothes rockers know that by copping a hoodie you’re making ~1,000 dangerous choices: You want the shoulders to land here and the hemline to hit here; you want the knit to be this weight and this level of softness; you want it in pullover form (2010-2023) and you want it in zip-front form, too (2023-present); you’ve got to decide, kangaroo pocket or no; you don’t want any drawstrings dangling and bobbing — unless you do, so you can cinch that s**t, in which case you’ve got to find the right type of cord, the right style of eyelet, and the right drawstring tips.

And once you’ve gotten a handle on all those variables, you’ve still got to tackle the most confounding variables of all: the silhouette, aperture and volume of the hood itself.

On that score, I’ve got to make a Spyplane Confession. I’ve developed a yearslong mental block on rocking hoodies, as much as I love them in theory. And until last week, I simply could not maneuver my way through this obstacle.

II. Do I actually hate hoodies?

The blockage comes down to this. I like the way a good hoodie looks and feels on me when the hood is up. I’m swaddled, I’m armored, I’m looking like a swag magus.

But when the hood is down — which for me is most of the time — I run into problems with all that excess fabric, either bunched up in an ungainly heap behind my head, fanning flat across my shoulders like a silly little cape, or, even worse, drooping with the flaccid dejection of a spent balloon.

I f**k with the look of a hood up. I tend not to f**k with the look of a hood down.

The last hoodie I bought was in 2021, a mud-dyed Visvim “Jumbo” that I rarely wore and recently found a better home. I loved it as an object, and admired it on others, but didn’t rock it much, because I so viscerally disliked the way the hood looked on me when down — not only in the back, but in the front, too, where the neckline refused to sit neatly, gaping forth to reveal serged interior seams and making me feel sloppy.

I still own the indigo-dyed Visvim jumbo above right, because its slightly thicker material mitigates the problematic neckline physics. But it still doesn’t see a ton of action, because — outside of chilly morning errands & hikes where I wear the beater above left — I’ve developed a Paralyzing Hoodie Complex (P.H.C.) and mostly avoid wearing them...

It’s gotten to the point where Regular People see a viral video of “Benson Boone” yell-singing a capella and they think about how funny it is, but all I can think about is how there’s a family-size platter of fabric resting on man’s shoulders:

But the other day I experienced a profound paradigm shift.

III. What if you hack the hoodie’s source code at the most elemental level?

There I was at NYC’s best new clothing shop, Ven. Space, looking at some SS25 clothes from The Most Exciting Label to Me at the Moment, Tokyo’s A. Presse, when I found a zip-front Hoodie With the Power to Change Everything.

This power derives from the fact that it is not only generally sick, but that its hood in particular is deceptively but audaciously petite.

The SS25 A. Presse zip-front sweatshirt looks fantastic despite (because of??) its very small hood. Portraits once again by the king Bobby Doherty

I’m talking about a well-calibrated petiteness, to the degree that if you just wear the hood down, it looks tidy and sharp. But if you try to wear the hood? Brother, it tugs everything skyward along with it. You’d need to be built like the headshrunken dude in Beetlejuice (A. below) … Otherwise you risk looking like Cornholio (B. below)…

“Do not even try to pull the hood up,” Ven’s Chris Green told me when I took it off the rack. But I knew that already. I’d spied this exact hoodie online, in product shots and a fit pic by Spyfriend Samer Saliba. I thought it looked fantastic on Samer hood down. And whereas for him the proposition of buying a hoodie with an effectively inoperable hood was understandably a dealbreaker, for me there was something enticing about the notion. What if this seeming bug was a feature?

I tried it on, confirmed that it was gas, and formulated an airtight logical theorem: I’d all but stopped wearing hoodies because I disliked the look of the hood worn down, owing to the excess fabric. Maybe it was time I flipped the script and rocked a hoodie that could only be worn hood-down because it had too little fabric.

That was all the craggy-brained swag-semiotic reasoning I needed. I bought the hoodie, and have worn it every day for the last week. I’m wearing it as I type this sentence.

The other day I asked the new homie Alex over at A. Presse to shed some light on their decision to make this hood so small.

He confirmed my hunch that it was about period accuracy: A. Presse specializes, like several top-notch Japanese clothing lines, in repro vintage, and this garment, he explained, was inspired by a specific waffle-insulated “Parka hoodie” from the ‘60s. “That’s the exact size they used to make it at this time.”

If you look at ‘60s-era photos of athletes in hoodies — e.g. Muhammad Ali looking excellent here, as always in 1965 — their hoods tended to fit smaller and much closer to the dome, tugging the shoulders upward in the process. The A. Presse hoodie pushes this to an almost avant-garde extreme. (FWIW, Alex added that “parts are dead stock, so we cannot produce this style anymore after SS26.”)

IV. Skeuomorphic Swag

Ultimately, the actual design intention behind this small hood matters less to me than its ramifications. If you treat the hood as a vestigial, decorative, post-functional element — like the little handle on a bottle of maple syrup (C. above), which is not only the textbook example of a skeumorph but also looks like a hoodie with a small hood — then what you get is a hoodie that looks better, hood-down, than the vast majority of hoodies with fuller hoods.

I’m not alone here. I’ve bounced this epiphany off a few tasteful friends who agreed that hoodies tend to be too big and who were intrigued by the idea of a good-looking inoperable one. As you can see in the Auralee runway detail D. above, even the masterful stylists at that label cinched the hood and kept it down, dealing with The Problem of the Hood by reining in the messy excess and re-assigning it to pure collar duty. The A. Presse joint does something similar, but at the level of patternmaking.

You might still be thinking, “Blackbird Spyplane, I simply can’t conscience buying a hoodie where the hood doesn’t work.” I feel you. But for me, the hood’s decorativeness here doesn’t just suit my purposes. It reminds me of any number of other design elements that have migrated from functional to ornamental so fully that we hardly recognize their previous functionality anymore.

Think of shirt tails on button-ups we never tuck. Think of locker loops under the backs of collars. Perhaps most compellingly: Think of the little pocket (E. above) on a pocket tee. When was the last time you put anything in one of these? Unless it’s something extremely thin and lightweight, the pocket will bulge weirdly and tug the whole tee out of whack. In other words, a pocket on a t-shirt is an effectively non-functional, purely decorative element. I tend to much prefer the way a tee looks pocketed than sans pocket, and no one bats an eye at the notion of buying one and never “using” the pocket.

This is simply the hoodie equivalent. Are you bold enough to accept it?? For my part, I’ve escaped my Paralyzing Hoodie Complex, and I’m not looking back.

What’s the point of a hoodie?

Hacking the source code of a surprisingly vexing staple

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