When was the first hoodie created

The first hoodies The first hooded garments made an appearance in the 12th century. Monks wore cloaks with hoods, while some outdoor workers sported capes with hoods to protect them from the elements. Some historians believe the hoodie can be traced back as far as Ancient Greece. Image Credit. The modern-day hoodie The hoodie as we recognise it today was created in s America by US company Champion.

Hoods were added to sweaters to keep warehouse workers in New York warm in the bitter winters. Must have been a very itchy sport before the invention of cotton jersey… Champion Products, known back then as the Knickerbocker Knitting Company, is credited as the creator of the first hooded sweatshirt. It was marketed to cold-storage workers as a way to keep warm during work. The New York hip hop culture adopted the hoodie as a useful way to conceal your identity.

Ideal for graffiti artist while they were spraying their paint on walls and buildings. Suddenly the hoodie was linked to illicit activities and what was then perceived as a provocative subculture. Highlight to the popularity of the hoodie was its iconic appearance in the Rocky movie in The hoodie became again connected to its working class roots and in the same time a part of mainstream culture. The rise of hip hop into the mainstream and the popularity of urban fashion trends contributed greatly to his achievement.

No matter how widespread and accepted the hoodie has become, it still carries a lot of baggage. Marc Zuckerberg caused quite a stir when he chose to meet Wall Street investors wearing a hoodie. Was it a statement of just a ploy? Again the hoodie was subject of debate with the conclusion that Marc wearing a hoodie had more to do with his image as non-conformist than making a casual fashion statement. The hoodie became a banner for supporters of Trayvon Martin, uniting those looking for justice for the life lost.

And if so, how can an article of clothing so ubiquitous cast such a sinister shadow? From its association with punk and hip-hop to skater culture, the hoodie has a history of being adopted by youth-driven communities once relegated to the fringes, imbuing it with an iconoclastic, sometimes criminal, subtext. The hoodie was born of modest origins. Champion Products, which began as the Knickerbocker Knitting Company in , claims to have made the first hooded sweatshirt.

Originally a sweater mill, Champion began making sweatshirts in the early s once it developed methods to sew thicker underwear material. According to Harold Lipson, a former president at Champion who started at the company in , the hood was first added to sweatshirts in order to protect athletes and laborers from the elements.

Employees at cold-storage warehouses and tree surgeons working through the winter were calling for a garment that would provide more warmth than their long underwear. Meanwhile Champion was working directly with high schools to determine their apparel needs, eventually making big double-thickness hooded sweatshirts that football and track athletes wore on the sidelines in bad weather.

The hoodie made the leap from practicality to personal style when athletes started to give their track gear to their girlfriends to wear. Just as they are today, high schools were a breeding ground for popular fashion, and soon sportswear caught on as a fashionable style.

Fast forward to the mid-Seventies, when hip-hop culture was developing on the streets of New York City.

Picture this archetypical scene from the earliest days of hip-hop: A DJ is spinning two turntables in the park, while an MC rhymes on the mic. A crowd gathers. All the while, says Deal, the stick-up-kids hang back, watching.

Then there were the graffiti artists, who were also engaging in illicit activities by marking up train cars and subway stations and trying to maintain anonymity. Similarly, the formative years of skateboarding are filled with tales of trespass and evasion. In the mid-Seventies, when the waves were bad in Santa Monica, a ragged surf and skate team known as the Z-Boys found the rounded bellies of empty swimming pools to be ideal riding terrain.

The only problem was that they were typically unwanted guests. The Z-Boys reinvented skateboarding with an aggressive riding style and their hoodlum mentality rippled through consciousness of the skateboarding world. In the early Eighties, the dearth of skate parks forced skaters to adapt and skate wherever they could, legal or not.