Hood by Alison Kinney

Author:Alison Kinney
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury

4 “IT’S WHAT’S UNDER THE HOOD THAT COUNTS”

The Disinherited Knight had exchanged his armour for the long robe usually worn by those of his condition, which, being furnished with a hood, concealed the features, when such was the pleasure of the wearer, almost as completely as the visor of the helmet itself, but the twilight, which was now fast darkening, would of itself have rendered a disguise unnecessary, unless to persons to whom the face of an individual chanced to be particularly well known.

—SIR WALTER SCOTT, Ivanhoe

Who else wears hoods? Everybody. Surpassing the hood’s long association with danger is its longer, infinitely varied precedent of fashion and practicality, hoods for all the purposes of our lives. Samurai wore foldable armored hoods, and women of the Azores wore giant, electric-blue, Marie Antoinette–looking capote e capelo hooded cloaks well into the twentieth century. Even Goya, that chronicler of hooded persecution and belief, painted people wearing completely innocuous, weather-appropriate hoods and veils in The Snowstorm (1787), and saucy hoods in Hush (1797–8). In the 1930s, Martha Graham danced in hooded costumes that resembled fabric tubes; by the late 1960s, everybody was wearing hooded maxi dresses.

And we all wear hoodies. On a 2011 Newsweek cover, Sarah “waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists” Palin wore a heather-gray hockey-mom hoodie to announce that she could win the US presidency. In 2006, Sean Combs bedazzled a black-and-white, cotton/polyester-blend hoodie with crystals, for the collection of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. The world’s most sublime operatic tenor, Jonas Kaufmann, wore a black hoodie on the cover of his Winterreise album, more or less deliberately evoking Romano-British hibernal mosaics. The National September 11 Memorial Museum sells a black “Darkness Hoodie” that proclaims, “In Darkness We Shine Brightest”; after American Giant’s Made in the USA hooded sweatshirt (100 percent cotton, streamlined fit, double-lined hood) was proclaimed the “greatest hoodie ever made,” the influx of orders resulted in a four-month backlog and the opening of four new stateside factories to sew them.1

Even presidents wear hoods. Doro Bush Koch’s memoir of her father, George H. W. Bush, captions one photo, “Dad jokes with his staff by wearing a hooded robe during a daily intelligence briefing in 1990.”2 What was so funny—the very fact of his wearing a jellāba? Or was he laughing about the Masonic conspiracy theories that the photo would unleash? All we know is that, should President Bush take a midnight stroll around his neighborhood wearing that hood, the neighborhood watch won’t shoot him.

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