I’ve long wanted to develop a think piece on the hoodie. This seemingly innocuous and simple piece of clothing carries immense weight.

Everyone owns one. It’s ubiquitous, practical and comfortable, yet I dare say it is one of the most disrespected items we possess.

For most people, a hoodie is something you wear without thinking. You wear it at home, while exercising, as part of school gear, and sometimes even at work. You can accessorise it, formalise it, or just throw it on for comfort. It’s ordinary. It’s easy. It makes sense.

But that ease is not afforded to all of us. There’s a stigma that shadows the hoodie, depending on who’s wearing it.

Kim Kardashian can make a hoodie the accessory of the summer: cute, sexy, and smart. She can turn it into a global fashion statement. A white person can wear a hoodie and disappear into the crowd. A Black person wears a hoodie, and suddenly they’re visible in all the wrong ways.

For Black people, and particularly Black men, the hoodie isn’t just a piece of cloth: it’s a provocation, a red flag to the social order. It becomes a signal of threat, of deviance. It evokes suspicion. In the eyes of the law, of security, of media, it becomes a costume: the uniform of the criminal, the thug, the danger.

That same softness and anonymity that others enjoy becomes something we have to negotiate, mitigate, or weaponise. Because a Black man in a hoodie is not presumed harmless. He is presumed guilty in all sorts of ways.

This isn’t paranoia, my brethren; it’s lived experience. It’s the legacy of a system that criminalises Blackness in its most casual, human forms. The hoodie, for us, can mean harassment. It can mean jail. In some tragic cases, it can mean death.

Its history is far and long. We can trace the hoodie’s evolution from religious wear worn by monks and priests to protective gear for labourers and factory workers, usually worn in trying working conditions. Later, it became associated with sportswear and the street, particularly in the cultural movements of Black America. In the 1980s and '90s, hip hop put claim to it as a symbol of rebellion and identity. It became a way for young Black men to assert presence in a world that made them invisible or reviled. And in the prison system, after arrest, Black men were often stripped of belts for fear of suicide. Pants sagged. Hoodies were used to cover up, just a small act of self-dignity in a space designed to humiliate.

The most sinister historical reference point, however, is often left unspoken: the white hood of the Ku Klux Klan. Designed to make white supremacist violence anonymous, the Klan’s pointed hood and robe were garments of terror and hate. They inverted the hoodie’s humble origins, turning anonymity into domination and fabric into an emblem of violence.

Their hoods erased individual identity to create a faceless, collective menace, a mob that claimed racial purity while hiding behind cloth. Comical and dangerous.

It is impossible to fully grasp the symbolic weight of the hoodie today without reckoning with this lineage.

Racial violence and fear have long worn hoods. But the way we interpret who’s beneath the hood is what reveals our biases. When a white man wears a hood, as in the Klan, or in casual tech-bro fashion (think Facebook dude), he is often seen as part of a system, an institution, or a trend. When a Black man wears one?

We saw the video of that Black kid Trayvon Martin wearing a hoodie when he was killed by cops, and so was Eric Garner. Many others. An imaginary hooded figure was “present” when a famous Paralympian shot his girlfriend in the face. Their deaths have embedded the hoodie into my consciousness, not as a piece of clothing, but as a symbol of suspicion and a justification for death and killing.

It has become a global emblem of protest. Activists, athletes, and even politicians have worn hoodies in defiance. But the stigma has not lifted.

Even more unsettling is how the hoodie has recently been reappropriated by Kanye West, once a cultural symbol of Black brilliance and now a figure unravelling in public. In his antisemitic rants and increasingly erratic public appearances, he has used the pointed KKK hoodie and the dark, face-covering versions as a visual marker of rebellion, martyrdom, and menace. No longer simply fashion or utility, the hoodie becomes performance: a cloak of victimhood and aggression, a tool to dramatise his collapse while projecting hatred.

That he has invoked these aesthetics while aligning with white supremacist rhetoric and profiting from it makes it all the sadder. A Black man echoing the Klan’s visual style while spewing hate speech is beyond sad; it is unforgivable.

It collapses the protest hoodie into a theatre of confusion, appropriating its symbolism in ways that betray its historical weight.

But then again, perception is everything. At times, when a Black man wears a hoodie, he is read as lazy, unkempt, unambitious and a walking stereotype. When a white person wears the same item, they’re seen as casual, trendy, and relatable. That disparity speaks volumes about how race mediates our reading of even the most neutral object.

A hoodie can signal relaxation, downtime, and safety, but only for those privileged enough not to be read as a threat. For the rest of us, it is a negotiation with space, gaze, and fear.

The media plays a powerful role in entrenching this bias. On screen, in advertisements and in music videos, the hoodie becomes visual shorthand in cheap iconography for Blackness as danger, deviance, or pathology.

The young gangster, the drug dealer, and the petty criminal are always in hoodies. But when Natalie Portman is heartbroken, she’s on the couch in a hoodie, watching a rom-com, symbolising vulnerability and innocence. The same fabric, the same cut, but one image invites suspicion, the other sympathy.

We don’t talk enough about how deep that coding runs. Or how it informs our instincts. I know this because I, too, have internalised it.

I have crossed the street at night when I saw a figure in a hoodie. Because I’ve been taught to be afraid. Conditioned by the very images I now critique. That’s the insidious nature of structural violence: it operates not just from above and outside, but within us.

I’ve also used the hoodie as protection. When I’m walking down an alley late at night, pulling my hoodie over my head makes me feel less exposed. It creates distance around me. I’ve learnt to weaponise it, not only against others but against a society that already sees me as weaponised. Sometimes, the threat I project becomes the shield I need. There’s something deeply tragic about that, about using fear as a form of safety.

I have many personal stories of being profiled and mistaken for a criminal. One night, I was sitting in the parked car of a white female friend. Head covered in a hoodie. We were casually chatting when police pulled up beside us. Their attention went straight to her. Was she okay? Was she in danger? Who was I to her? They asked her the same questions over and over. When I protested and called out their bullshit, it gave them a license to force me out of the car and search me and the vehicle. The justification was that the car and I resembled a marked vehicle of criminals. Sure thing.

I’ve entered stores dressed neatly, only to be shadowed by staff, while my white male friend, in a hoodie and shorts, shops in peace. That’s privilege. Not just to move freely, but to wear freely without your clothing being read as a statement, a warning, or a liability.

These microaggressions are not small or isolated. They accumulate. They brutalise. They shape how we see ourselves and how we are seen.

Even when I shop for a hoodie, I think carefully. It can’t be black, grey, brown, or red, as that’s too threatening. It must be light and friendly. Pink, pale blue, maybe white. When worn, I must accessorise it with a designer coat or fancy shoes, just to signal that I am safe, civilised, and not to be feared.

I know there are spaces where my wearing a hoodie will trigger discomfort, not because of etiquette, but because of what my body in a hoodie has come to mean.

Many people have never thought deeply about it. Why would they? For those people, it’s just fabric. Not deep. But for others, it is a garment that punishes and reveals. It tells us how society codes class, race, gender, and violence. It shows us who gets to be anonymous and who gets to be marked.

We need to interrogate this. We need to call to account the media that continues to use costume as character shorthand, reinforcing lazy and dangerous stereotypes. We need to see fashion not only as neutral but also as charged with meaning.

We need to confront how complicity hides in plain sight. If jean pants have crossed class and racial boundaries, then surely the hoodie, which we all love and live in, can do the same. But only if we’re willing to unpack the myths stitched into its seams.

Let’s interrogate how clothing can also feed our imagination. We’re not bold enough to admit the ways we’ve allowed a piece of cotton to mean dignity or danger, all depending on the body it covers. The hoodie is cheap and accessible. It’s what you wear when you have to. And let’s be honest, poverty has a face, and it is often Black. And that very fact has made it the scapegoat of a thousand narratives.

The irony is that I love my hoodie. To me, it is an essential piece of clothing. I have cried in it, written in and on it, slept in it, and hugged people in it. I have laughed while wearing it. I have kissed someone I love while wearing one. I have given it to someone as comfort. I have worn it to protect myself from the world and from the cold. It is intimate, everyday, ordinary.

And still, it carries all this weight.

So no, this is not just about fabric. It’s about the semiotics of fear. The mechanics of comfort as well. It is about the politics of public space. It’s about how we construct danger through dress and how easily we do it when the body beneath looks a certain way.

We need to call out those who play a role in entrenching stereotypes, in relying on tired tropes, and in criminalising fashion and culture when it’s worn by the wrong people.

We need to ask ourselves who gets to look casual and who gets to look criminal. Who gets to look cute, and who gets to look threatening? Who gets to disappear, and who gets profiled?

As fashion transforms, so must we. Let’s do the same for the hoodie. Let’s let it be complicated, let it be soft, let it be protest, let it be protection. Let it be for all of us.

Let it be what it always was: just clothing. And so much more.