The Hoodie Incident

People are funny, eh? You can never tell what drives someone to offer an opinion or observation, or a plainly idiotic statement. One thing is sure: our perceptions are coloured by our individual experience. Fear and prejudice can wring the most curious responses ... though, admittedly, some folks are simply out to create a reaction.

Take the hoodie incident.

When shopping for Ter’s birthday, I bought her a pair of silly socks from Sugar & Cotton. Since then, I’ve been getting promos from their site. Cool cutlery, pretty jewellery, glittery scarves ... and an asymmetrical hoodie that I think is awesome in a Star Wars, Sithy kind of way. (The Sith, for the sadly uninitiated, are the villains in a galaxy far, far away; villains to whom I am partial for reasons that yet elude rational explanation.) Each time I log into FB—which is not all that often—an ad for this hoodie pops up and finally, unable to resist the notion of sporting a functional garment given a wicked cool twist, I ordered one. In black, of course.

Then I noticed the FB comments. I pay little attention to reviews, choosing instead to trust my own sense of whether or not something is worth my time and/or money, but sprinkled among those comments of “love it!” or “can get it cheaper here” were a couple of scathing observations that likened this trendy runway item to, of all things, a birka. A birka? Seriously? I took a second to shake off that one, then caught further comments along similar lines. A sort of religious tussle almost ensued as people took sides ... arguing about radical Islam tainting fashion design.

Okay, maybe I’m missing something. I hope I would have a bit of an issue myself with a frivolous industry building on a practice that oppresses women. If I thought for an instant that the designer of this item was less a Star Wars fan and more a radical Islamic nutball, I probably wouldn’t have bought one. But I don’t think that. The possibility never even occurred to me. That it occurred to someone—anyone—else is a show of hypersensitivity that may either be connected to past experience, or it may just be a guy with a biased intent to cause an uproar.

I don’t live under a rock. I am aware of global events and social upheaval and cultural oppression and political hot potatoes ... yet when I saw this hoodie, all I thought was “Cool!” I didn’t dig deeper because I didn’t feel the need. You can call me shallow for missing what’s apparently obvious to others. You may call the dissenters socially conscious and applaud them, but if we all relax, we might also see this for what it really is:

A hoodie.