The Horror of the Hoodie:: Clothing the Criminal

Turney, Joanne (2017) The Horror of the Hoodie:: Clothing the Criminal. In, Turney, Joanne (ed.) Fashion Crimes: Dressing for Deviance. 1 ed. London. I.B. Tauris. (Submitted)

Abstract

In 2006, the Bluewater Shopping Centre, Kent, UK, banned wearing hoodies (sweatshirts with hoods) on its premises. This simple and localised action sparked a media furore that created a moral panic , which drew attention to an innocuous garment that had, up to that point been a piece of universal clothing worn by all. The hoodie ban highlighted - and clothed – wider social concerns surrounding criminality, youth, social disobedience and the development of an underclass that contributed to a ‘Broken Britain’. By naming and giving form to broad social concerns –‘hoodie’ became the name of opposing positions surrounding social disaffection and criminality, i.e. subject and object/person and object /idea and action - and thus the garment was both demonised and criminalised, and a modern folk devil was born.
By 2007, the hoodie had become both object and subject described by then shadow home secretary David Davis as part of a ‘hooligan’s tool kit’ and by 2011, a symbol of a disaffected, ‘feral’ class. In the London (and UK wide) riots of 2011 – the focus of this chapter - firmly established the hoodie with criminality, and particularly a criminality that could avoid detection in a world mediated and policed by CCTV cameras. It was at this point that the hoodie became costume; battle dress for the masses taking advantage of social and civil chaos.
In this chapter, I revisit and redress my previous writing surrounding the hoodie (Turney, 2009) considering the cultural, social and political climate 2006-2011 and the symbolic potential and exploitation of a sweatshirt with a hood. From this contextual backdrop, the chapter discusses the reportage particularly that exhibited in the iconography documented through press photography and vox pops, through to academic reports assessing the causes and outcomes of the riots in conjunction with ‘deliberate’ hoodie wearing as a sign of criminal intent and participation.

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