Melbourne: In cold weather, few items of clothing beat a hoodie. It is comfortable, warm and, for many people, effortlessly cool.
But where did the hoodie come from, and how did it become so ubiquitous?
From warmth and protection to sportswear and then streetwear, the hoodie has, over the decades, become entangled with groups and gangs, surveillance and control, fear and policing, race and power.
Hoodies can divide, but they can also bring people together. With this in mind, they might be described as “our last truly political item of clothing”.
Hoods in history
Hooded garments are nothing new. In fact, they are very old.
The Orkney Hood, discovered in a peat bog on Scotland's Orkney Islands, covered the head and shoulders of a child during the late Iron Age, between the third and seventh centuries CE.
In 1936, a Swedish bog revealed the “Bocksten Man”. He was still wearing the clothes he died in, sometime between 1350 and 1370. His woollen hood added warmth to his outfit, which included a tunic and mantle, or cloak, along with long socks, footwraps and leather shoes. It also gave researchers centuries later clues about his status and changing hood fashions.
Medieval monks wore austere versions of hooded garments, which helped with the inner contemplation demanded by monastic life. Medieval knights, meanwhile, donned chain-mail hoods as part of their protective armour.
Women's gabled hoods, worn around 1500, were wired into a point at the top of the head, with fabric draping over the shoulders. They were fashionable as well as modest, before the French hood, which was pushed back to reveal the hair, was popularised by Anne Boleyn.
Other forms of hoods appeared over the centuries. But it was only in the 20th century that the hoodie as we know it today emerged.
The origins of the hoodie
The word “hoodie” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006 to mean “a hooded sweatshirt, fleece, or other garment”. The garment itself had its origins on the sports field and in hard manual work decades earlier.
The company that later became Champion Athletic Apparel developed a hooded sweater in the 1930s. The functional garment was designed to keep athletes warm before a game. The hooded garment also appealed to manual workers.
In Australia, hooded jumpers worn for ice skating and other outdoor winter sports became fashionable among women in the 1940s.
“Here it is, the hooded jumper you’ve dreamed of for those bleak days of winter when the wind sends shivers down your spine,” a knitting pattern in one Melbourne newspaper declared, encouraging women to make their own.
Sylvester Stallone, playing boxer Rocky Balboa, helped lift hoodies from sportswear into the cultural zeitgeist. The iconic training scene in the first Rocky film, with Stallone running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, helped establish the garment as a symbol of grit and determination.
Nearly 40 years later, Michael B Jordan starred opposite Stallone in Creed, and the grey hoodie appeared again. This time, however, it also reflected a deep racial divide.
From sportswear to streetwear
In the 1980s and 1990s, youth culture transformed the garment from sportswear into streetwear.
Breakdancers and graffiti artists adopted hoodies. So did skaters and snowboarders, as the garment became a symbol of a younger generation – and soon, of moral panic. Hip-hop artists and rappers, including Eminem and Ice-T, gave the hoodie an added edge.
Oversized and baggy hoodies became associated with youth crime, including vandalism, violence and shoplifting. With the hood pulled up, they were often portrayed as symbols of rebellion and defiance, with their ability to make wearers appear menacingly anonymous.
The hoodie's bad reputation led to bans in shopping centres in the United Kingdom, the United States and New Zealand during the 2000s. A ban was even trialled in Australia, although it was quickly scrapped following community outrage.
The tragic killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012 sent shockwaves around the world. Martin, an unarmed African American teenager, was wearing a hoodie when he was fatally shot after being perceived as “suspicious”.
In the aftermath of Martin's death, some questioned the role his hoodie played in the shooting. His death also sparked the Million Hoodie March, a protest against racial profiling.
It prompted a troubling question: who could wear the garment without fear of repercussions, and how much of that was determined by age or skin colour?
Power and politics
When a young Mark Zuckerberg held meetings with investors just months after Trayvon Martin's death, his hoodie raised eyebrows for different reasons. His sartorial rebellion challenged conventional corporate dress codes.
US politician John Fetterman now frequently wears his preferred combination of a hoodie and shorts. He even wore a hoodie printed to resemble a tuxedo, a reference to the black-tie dress code, to the 2024 White House Correspondents' Dinner and another to Donald Trump's second presidential inauguration.
Hoodies remain a potential flashpoint for power and politics.
That is why an exhibition focused on the style staple at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam in 2019, and later at the Museum of Design Atlanta in 2026, provocatively invited visitors to consider: “What do you see when you look at this garment, and what might others see?”.