Photo Credit Photo illustration by Mauricio Alejo
It was knit from gray lamb's wool. It defined a gray area. On a stark set, amid the playback of a plaintive address to an ex, the hip-hop star Drake danced to the beat of his own drum machine in the video for ''Hotline Bling'' while bundled in a roomy sweater with a collar that rose to touch his resolute jaw. Designers have often praised the turtleneck for the way that it moves with the body, and that was its job here, to envelop and underline Drake's dancing — dancing that was objectively uncool, a choreography of private pleasure.
''Hotline Bling'' is a song about placing booty calls, and this turtleneck, with its forgiving dad-wear cut, seemed an invocation of an afghan that lovers might have snuggled under. Yet a fan wouldn't have wanted it to be any more body-hugging, which would have given Drake's jerks, knee bends and swivels the unfortunate effect of Mike Myers's turtlenecked character, Dieter, in the old ''Sprockets'' sketch. Instead, Drake was giving the public a performance of masculinity that it hadn't known it wanted.
Continue reading the main story Slide Show High-Collared Rebellion
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One evening in London in 1924, when the playwright Noël Coward was recently famous, he opened his newspaper to learn that he had originated a fashion for colorful high-necked sweaters. The turtleneck, which had long been humbly insulating longshoremen and sea dogs against the salty air, suddenly achieved symbolic value. In his memoir ''Present Indicative,'' Coward claims that he turned to turtlenecks ''more for comfort than for effect,'' blithely sliding past the fact that the simple show of privileging comfort invariably creates its own effect. He noticed ''more and more of our seedier West End chorus boys'' slithering into these sweaters over the months that followed, and he seemed pleased to have had a hand in investing the turtleneck with new social standing.
There was a current of exoticism to it and more than a whiff of moral laxity, sharing a certain flamboyant ease with a more famous, less versatile sartorial statement of Coward's — the dressing gown. Loitering around Oxford that November, Evelyn Waugh marveled at the popularity of the new high-necked sweater on the party scene, judging it ''most convenient for lechery because it dispenses with all unromantic gadgets like studs and ties.'' Further, the garment offered cosmetic benefits: ''It also hides the boils with which most of the young men seem to have encrusted their necks.'' That these two aspects of the turtleneck — easy access, convenient concealment — are mutually useful has forever since been appreciated by teenagers whose dates have been so rash as to raise hickeys.
If the foundational premise of the turtleneck as a style is opposition, its patron saint is Juliette Gréco, the French singer who was a muse and mascot of Left Bank intellectuals in the 1950s. When the face of this existentialist it girl, eyes contoured in kohl, was photographed popping from a black turtleneck sweater, she supplied the enduring template for Bohemian black. The idea that a few inches of fabric might not only indicate a lifestyle but also incarnate an approach to the universe was an absurdity too delicious to resist, so no one did, and the austere, informal and yet ceremonious black turtleneck entered the iconography of nonconformism.
Its simplicity ensured its success as an international export, a marker of the willfully artis tic and the media clichés thereof. This was the model for the gamine glamour of Audrey Hepburn in ''Funny Face'' and the ascetic elegance of a modern dancer in her all-business leotard. This was, with bongo drums and beret, both the fact and the parody of the basic Beatniks. The rakishness of Coward's turtleneck combined with the intellectual credentials of Gréco's to make this the go-to costume announcing disciplined resistance. Britain's ''angry young men'' (with their corduroy pants and full-body brooding) and the Black Panthers (with their slick leather jackets and steely affect) were each armored to the chin, the high collar throwing forceful faces into high relief.
This revolution was televised to impressive ratings. The gesture of refusal went pop. The trimly militant turtleneck made an apt sheath for a sleuth like Steve McQueen in ''Bul litt'' (1968) or Richard Roundtree in ''Shaft'' (1971). Each hero had a silhouette that seemed, like his name, built for speed. For two or three years, the average American male tried to treat the turtleneck as a substitute for the shirt and tie, extending its social politics into the dining room, much to the consternation of the headwaiter. Johnny Carson could carry this off, but the average guy risked seeming like a square straining to get his mouth around the vogue words of hepcat slang.
The very persistence of the shirt and tie points to the ticklish problem of the neck as a charged and vulnerable space pleading for special attention from the male wardrobe. The widespread disruption of the traditional scheme seeme d an opportunistic decadence, a bit like the ethos of free love curdling into a key party. The 1969 playscript for Neil Simon's ''Plaza Suite'' describes a movie producer ''dressed in 'Hollywood Mod,' with a tan turtleneck sweater and tight blue suede pants.'' That way lay disco and its disgraces.
Women wore the rebellious turtleneck longer. Then as now, there was a certain sophistication in the overwhelming rejection of décolletage; this sweater said that her eyes were up here. There is no turtleneck specified on that famous Joan Didion packing list, but doesn't it seem that there should be? The aura of 1970s Didion, with her cigarettes and her migraines, is decidedly turtlenecked. But the photo record suggests it was more a Susan Sontag item, a jet-set cerebral u niform for forging ideas beneath a dramatic hairdo.
Six decades after Juliette Gréco, there came along a Frenchman named Grégoire Bouillier, who sounded the depths of the turtleneck's degradation in a memoir titled ''The Mystery Guest.'' Dumped by a girlfriend, Bouillier develops a strange case of what he terms ''sartorial neurosis'': ''I started wearing hideous turtlenecks as undershirts the moment she left.'' To him, these combined the features of an emotional bandage and a psychologic hair shirt, for he had always ''despised the men who wore them as the lowest kind of pseudosportsmen'' and supposed that women were correct to share his abhorrence.
Like many creatures first spotted in the wild, the turtleneck re-emerged in the 1980s in captivity, heralded as a staple — occasionally embellished with tiny whimsical prints — in ''The Preppy Handbook.'' Rehabilitated, it entered the terrain of later-stage Nora Ephron and her self-deprecating riffs on feeling bad about her neck, destined to camouflage wattles and represent complacency. The sensible, newly conservative turtleneck was figured as ideal gear for a wholesome weekend frolic with your golden retriever and your catalog-model spouse. Ballooning in shape, it lost its inherent tension — a dynamic most embarrassingly illustrated by a promotional photo for the 1990s sitcom ''Mad About You'' in which the co-stars, Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt, pull the necks of their matching sweaters over their mouths as if they've taken a fatal fall into the Gap. It is an image not so much androgynous as sexless and a vision of the turtleneck as a towel that has been thrown in.
The apotheosis of the deliberately boring normcore turtleneck was found on Steve Jobs, who arrived at his stark trademark look after striking up a friendship with the designer Issey Miyake, who gave him 100 or so of them. According to Walter Isaacson's biography, Jobs ''came to like the idea of having a uniform for himself, because of both its daily convenience … and its ability to convey a signature style.'' If the Bohemian turtleneck indicated, as Anne Hollander wrote in ''Seeing Through Clothes,'' ''the kind of freedom from sartorial convention demanded by deep thought,� �' Jobs's turtleneck was its techno-corporate mutation, firmly utilitarian and faintly utopian, giving the impression of being ahead of a time that had yet to arrive. It is no coincidence that the turtleneck turns up frequently in science fiction, seen in ''Lost in Space'' and ''Logan's Run'' and lending a close-fitted bit of Starfleet chic.
There is a touch of this retro-futurism — the promise of a world evolved beyond fussy buttons — in the turtleneck that the peacocks are now flocking toward. Every Sunday evening that an N.F.L. quarterback emerges from the locker room wearing a jacket with peaked lapels over a sweater that swaddles his throat, a skirmish erupts on the sideline of the spectacle. For every approving observer, another bystander will cringe at having witnessed a revival of the vibe of Joe Namath's bachelor pad.
The Drakean refusal to be hemmed down and tucked in constitutes a kind of counterrebellion. In contrast to the eager chic of the GQ QBs, it is scaled to suit a sweatshirt aesthetic, rendering this turtleneck perfectly contemporary. The sign of the times reads, ''No jacket required.'' The maître d' is wearing a hoodie. Pseudosportsmanship is widely recognized as an international pastime. The reclamation of the turtleneck sweater as low-key athletic gear — a simple, slouchy pleasure that pretends to be nothing else — feels right, even if it looks off. And in the end, looks matter only so much when something is worn to dance as if no one were watching.
