What can a body do [in a hoodie]?

 

Who wears hoodies? Everybody; “Anybody who has style, anyone venturing into the wind or rain, anyone not utterly resistant to the world’s most functional, practical and ubiquitous piece of dress from the last century wears hoodies [emphasis added].” By virtue of the garment’s inherent qualities and the physical experience of wearing a hoodie, I intend to reveal that the hoodie is closely associated with the notion that dress is the boundary between the internal self and the external other. By understanding that boundary I argue that Hoodies intensify the enigmatic character of clothes as structures that have the simultaneous ability to hide and disclose the body. Instead of focusing on the political aspects of the hoodie which are already well covered in the literature, I understand the hoodie significantly through phenomenology to offer an account of how the personal becomes political in an unnecessary way. With many hoodies to choose to analyse, none could be more iconic than the 1980, Champion Reverse Weave hooded sweatshirt (hoodie). This Champion hoodie is broadly accepted by the fashion community as the godfather of the hoodie we know today and thus will be placed as the primary object in this philosophical inquiry. Originally created as a practical and utilitarian athletic garb, this hoodie was transformed in later decades by subcultures such as hip-hop and graffiti artists, skaters, and university students who who championed it as a uniform and propelled it into the mainstream – as these subcultures are more often than not pioneers of fashion throughout recent sartorial history. The essay will unfold through a personal, individualised perspective that holds the experience of the body at its core. Whilst underlining that anybody who wears a hoodie will share in the experience of its pernicious stigma. My analysis will take the following shape: first, it will introduce the body and how the body operates in space, then I will outline how the body operates in space when dressed, and finally, move to investigate how the body operates in space when dressed in a hoodie.

 

 

What is a body?

I have, in the past, written that it is impossible to argue for something that you cannot articulate. I confess now that I intend to contradict myself. It would be reasonable to think that in order to speak about what the body does when dressed in a hoodie, you must have a good conception of what the body is. However, in this instance it does not seem necessary. As Minh-Ha T. Pham proposes, instead of knowing what a body is, we might understand this double negative: “We don’t know what isn’t a body.” So although I have no conception of the body to offer myself (yet), it nonetheless seems fundamental that we ought to recognise our ‘not knowing’, and therefore, our involvement with a corporeal imagination in constructing the dressed body and its limits. 

By exploring ourselves (our bodies) as the receptor of our acts of dressing (embodiment), as opposed to understanding how we conceive our social selves through dress will include looking at the body not from the outside – I see the body, what can I say about it? – but from the inside – I am a body, what can I learn from that? According to this viewpoint, the body is characterised by its internal and external limits; feeling, sensation, emotionality, and other functionally agential acts that ground us in space. It focuses on what the body does rather than what it is. It is always defined through an encounter with ‘something else’, for instance, you shiver when in the snow, or when someone is walking behind you, you notionally feel them there – this is our ignorance of the limits which define the body. This perspective of understanding the world through the body is developed by Merleau-Ponty, who emphasises that the body is the locus of perception (embodiment) – he argues that, “The body is the vehicle of being in the world.” He suggests that the agential acts that we perform on our body, for example dressing, are to make visible the form of our intentions. It is this which defines our bodies in space. But there are things which we associate as the external factors responsible for the intersubjectivication of embodiment. This perspective considers the regimes of the internal versus external, which is often how we conceptualise ourselves in the world.

Although this may seem like I’m comparing bodies to a wall or a house, I am not. We are not a static interior and exterior. I mean that bodies rely on the idea that there are two distinct territories in their systems that distinguish them from everything else - clothing is an excellent example. Of central importance here is the notion popularised by Joanna Entwistle, that acts such as ‘dressing’ are dynamic situated bodily praxis which are embodied within a social space and fundamental to a microsocial order. Through ‘dressing’ one implicitly directs their body to conform to norms associated with a space in a given situation. This space is not a forgiving zone; it is contextual and collective, created by a normative structure in the microsocial order. It is this which influences the choices that inform others of our bodies. In close relation to this is Bourdieu’s theory of Habitus, which relates agential practices with constructed systems through the process he calls ‘habitus’. Put simply, he offers that as a result of various ‘habitual schemas’ and ‘dispositions’ we complete agental social practices, such as dressing (which create a habitus). These factors then are wedded with a manner of systems that are conceived of by a collective ‘us’, and these currencies of systems are then activated by certain structured social conditions (the external field) to which they both belong to, reproduce and modify. These constructive, situational practices of agency (habitus) are repeated, allowing bodies to learn and eventually depend on how dressing, for example, situates them in relation to the ‘microsocial’ – the norms of any situation. Then let us consider bodies as not equal in terms of the norm. We must also recognise that these bodies must be further placed into a normative hierarchy, organised according to the distance of the body in relation to the norm. As a result of their link with objects, things, and other bodies, bodies are never naked; they are always surrounded by items that organise and categorise social relationships. This ultimately positions us to examine bodies, dress, and the Champion hoodie - as I investigate how fashion objects may amplify the power of the normative hierarchy imposed on bodies in space – as Wilson eloquently writes, "Dress is the final frontier between the self and the not-self."

The corporeal imagination and hoodies 

Dress, as an embodied object, leaves an impression on the social world for the living body. It supplies meaning to the naked body. I suggest that the contemporary body is not itself without dress. I do not think it would be hard to argue that the contemporary person is clothed. Evidentially, clothes are often lauded as the ‘second skin’ of the body. Nguyen considers clothing to be an epidermal layer added to the body, rather than a decoration that can be readily removed. Dress defines the body through language concerning age, social status, gender, sexuality, and so on. It provides another filter to the public's systematic picture of the body. As a result, dress itself can seem paradoxical, at once part of our body and a compliment to it. But, as Quentin Bell puts it, “our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul.” Yet, this begs the uncomfortable question: where does the body end and where does dress begin? We return to the questioning of our bodily limits in space. Bourdieu’s theory of habitus may provide an answer. But it is more helpful to understand how these boundaries may be identified through ‘habitus’ and the Euclidean internal/ external. Furthermore, how the power of dress threatens the boundaries of the body, intensified by the Champion hoodie garment, which epitomises duplicity and the coexistence of presence and absence. 

Let's take the Champion hoodie as a garment which has the ability to bear the boundary between the external and internal. We must also appreciate the paradoxical nature of this fact. It would be fair to say that one feels both insulated by the heavy cotton garb (internally present), yet also, through its nature as clothing, shows itself off, simultaneously shielding and connecting the individual body from and to the collective self (externally present). Indeed, when I wear a hoodie and pull the hood up and over the majority of my head, I feel safe – 'invisible' – and present. Hoodies intensify the enigmatic character of clothes as structures that have the simultaneous ability to hide and disclose the body. This underlies the complex relationship between imagination, the clothed body and the naked body. The Champion hoodie bears figurative implications alluding to its revealing nature through its ability to work as a concealing tool while simultaneously emphasising what it conceals (as a result of collective consciousness). As a result, the hoodie is prepared for the injection of both individual and collective imagination. When dressing in a hoodie, personally, I am conscious of the flowing, baggy, and somewhat shapeless clothing structure which acts as a cohesive tissue while wearing the hoodie, blurring the boundaries and allowing it to diffuse through space. This quality of the clothing is not random. Despite its proclivity for connectedness as an universal garment, it embodies a certain everyday way of being and is thus a manner of structuring the body. This garment ‘doesn’t know what a body isn’t’, as all bodies may be ‘hood-able.’ As a result, anybody wearing a hoodie will share in the internal and external experiences that the hoodie hides and endangers the wearer.

Indeed, in our contemporary world, the hoodied body is inscribed with structural narratives of fear and anonymity, as a garment which “you can lose your life wearing”. If we follow Entwistle and think of dress as a way of defining ourselves through our bodies which exist in time and space, we may investigate dress as the agent of positioning. We must also acknowledge that the body and the dressed body do not live in a vacuum; the notion of space that I have been referring to strongly suggests that, “communities, cultures, and politics produce and are produced by the body and its dress.” Frantz Fanon provides an analogy of hierarchy to do with marginalised bodies in space called “combat breathing”: “There is no such thing as independent persons on occupied territory. In these conditions, an individual’s breathing is an observed, occupied breathing.” This elevated concept of breathing as a political concept corresponds with the way a body is enhanced as an embodied political object while dressed in a hoodie. A complementary example to Fanon’s could be conservate UK politician, David Cameron’s, ‘compassionately conservative’ “Hug-a-hoodie” speech, in which he stated, “For Young People, hoodies are often more defensive than offensive.” Hauntingly identifying the crucial aspect that all bodies can inhabit the hoodie, but how they inhabit it is determined by time and space.

The body is the territory where dress takes place and thus stems from its modalities of being-in-the-world such as the stereotypes and mythologies which arise from it. This thinking credits the Aristotelian notion that a requirement for the understanding and appreciation of art, and by extension dress, is an imaginative engagement with the piece. In doing so, the objects of art or dress train our emotions to respond to this simulacra in a ‘correct’ way, by activating our moral and ethical understanding. The hoodie and its blurring of boundaries alludes to the significance of the corporeal imaginary in this self-construction and social construction. I take the imaginary to mean the projection of both individual identities we seek to embody and Appadurai’s community based view which is described as, “an active productive force and a social fact.” Following this concept of corporeal imagination, the culmination of my thesis points to the way that bodies in hoodies are excessively politicised as a result of a communal imagination, which is a symptom of the way bodies inhabit a hoodie in space.

In answering the question I presented to myself at the beginning of this essay, we've seen how the body is not genuinely restricted by its physicality, but by the process of dressing that develops increased meaning throughout an imagined normative framework. Furthermore, we investigated how and why hooded bodies are intricately yet unnecessarily linked to political interactions. Finally, when wearing a hoodie, one is characterised by a shared experience, ultimately defined by what I call the corporeal imagination. To resist hoodie stigmatisation by the corporeal imagination, an additional effort of identifying one's position as a body within oneself is required, an effort that extends to the entirety of our societal behaviours.

 

 

 

 

References:

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