Bluewater shopping centre in Kent has banned the wearing of hooded tops and baseball caps, items of clothing that, it says, obscure the face and are “intimidating”.
John Prescott, speaking on the Today programme last Thursday, said he supported the ban, adding that he had had his own brush with threatening teenagers in hoodies: “I went to a motorway cafe about a year ago and some kid said something to me,” Prescott said. “I said, ‘What did you say?’ and he came back with 10 people with hoods, you know, these fellas with hoods on. He came at me in a very intimidating manner but, of course, I now have security control. They appeared and they vanished.
“What struck me about it is not only did they come with this kind of uniform, as it is, but they came with a kind of movie camera to take a film of any such incident. I found that very alarming. I think the fact you go around with these hats and these covers . . . I rather welcome what they have done at Bluewater.”
Tony Blair, speaking at his first monthly news conference since the election, backed Prescott’s support for the ban and went on to announce rather overdue legislation to tackle yobbery.
All this hostility to hoodies went down poorly with children’s groups. Richard Garside, director of the Crime and Society Foundation, said the prime minister’s comments were “more in keeping with an episode of What Not To Wear, rather than a Downing Street press conference . . . I look forward to hearing of the appointment of Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine as special advisers on crime and fashion”.
Amanda Allard, of the children’s charity NCH, said: “People wear hooded tops to be cool, not to be intimidating. If you demonise hooded tops then you feed on people’s fears about young people.” (Dear Ms Allard, do keep up. Some children think looking intimidating is cool.) The Children’s Society said it was important “not to confuse fashion with behaviour”, which seems a really peculiar and ignorant thing for a children’s organisation to say, because when you’re a teenager, fashion and behaviour go together like eggs and bacon. Your behaviour is dictated by what you wear and what you wear dictates your behaviour.
Funny how people speaking on behalf of children so often seem to have no recollection of what it was like to be a child. Maybe they were all massively square or socially ostracised or both — it certainly reads that way.
They also seem not to have any eyes in their heads. The fact is that ever since the teenager was invented, in the late 1940s, clothing has been at the epicentre of how young people define themselves. I wonder what the Children’s Society makes of the dozens of teen tribes that have existed in my living memory alone, starting with punk. Does it imagine, for instance, that punk was only about fashion and not about behaviour — that punk’s motto could have been “I am super-cheery and all’s well with the world”? That hippies were aggressive and pro-war beneath their kaftans? That Goths liked nothing more than skipping in the sunshine, beaming with joy and singing Lord of the Dance, especially if there was a tambourine about? And that people in the 1980s dancing bare-chested in fields absolutely loathed drugs? I mean, come on.
Hoodies say different things in different places. In Australia and New Zealand they say that the wearer — the hoodee — is either a surfer or a skateboarder or both and therefore smiley, benign, probably a bit stoned in a friendly, dolphin-loving sort of way.
When the wearer is under 10 they merely say that the hoodee is cosy and that his head is nice and warm. After this is where you start running into difficulties, because speaking against hoodies sounds racist and creepy as the hoodie is a favourite of young black men.
However, the truth of the matter is that they more often than not look scary and shadowy. Young white men in hoodies, ditto. And young brown men. Young men of any colour, in fact, with their faces obscured, standing around in the dark in menacing clusters: there isn’t a great deal to love about this look. Personally, I hate hoodies. I fear them, except at the beach. I make deliberate detours whenever I spot them.
The hoodie is meant to be a democratic garment, like the T-shirt, but because — uniquely among cool teenage must-haves, from the leather jacket onwards — its raison d’être is to obscure the face, all it succeeds in doing is to make the wearer look masked, like a cartoon mugger/ rapist. Occasionally that’s the point and I don’t think it is a point that we should be in any way encouraging. Young black men in hoodies do themselves no favours: they immediately get shunned by anyone who sees them, regardless of the fact that they may well be paragons. Young white men in hoodies don’t fare much better: they are instantly identified with the trashy, violent underclass.
Everybody is scared of hoodies: other teenagers, men, women — and dogs probably. That’s why hoodies sell. No teenager is so well adjusted that he can’t do with a bit of anti-social backup from his clothing. Banning hoodies, sadly, will only reinforce the idea that they are shorthand for a particular kind of hard, urban cool. It might make wandering around Bluewater more agreeable but it will make hoodies more desirable than ever.
Still, the one advantage of their proliferation is that at least hoodies are highly visible and do a good job of advertising potential trouble spots.
- Last month a report in The Lancet brought Accomplia to our attention. It was, you may recall, a wonder pill that caused people to lose weight and helped them to stop smoking and which ought to be available on the National Health Service next year. Last week news emerged of an as yet unnamed drug that will ensure that when obese people have lost weight it will stay off.
So, basically, if you get really, really fat — because you eat too much and don’t exercise — there will, in a short while, be two drugs to help you (because, of course, you couldn’t possibly help yourself). I find this completely unbelievable — and I write as someone who, shall we say, has her porky moments. Overeating happens for a reason — whether it’s insecurity, misery, self-destruction or plain old-fashioned greed.
First, swallowing pills like a gormless ninny fails to address any of these questions, which means that the problem is concealed, not solved.
Second, pills are not necessarily magical and benign and few are side-effect free. One diet drug, Fenfluramine, was banned in the United States in 1997 after evidence showed that it could damage heart valves; another, Ephedra, was also banned in America last year because people died while taking it.
Third, for heaven’s sake: if you want to lose weight it doesn’t mean that you are ill and in need of medication. It means that you need to eat less and move around more. That’s it.
