The HoodieThe Hoodie

On a recent night, shopping online for a light jacket or a cotton sweater -- some kind of outerwear to guard my body against a springlike breeze -- I clicked on the "new arrivals" page of the website of a popular retailer and encountered, unexpectedly, another instance of the complex oddity of race. Here, projecting catalog-model cordiality in the sterile space of an off-white backdrop, was a young Black man in a hoodie.

On the street, a Black guy in a hoodie is just another of the many millions of men and boys dressed in the practical gear of an easygoing era. Or he should be. This is less an analysis than a wish. The electric charge of the isolated image -- which provokes a flinch away from thought, a desire to evade the issue by moving on to check the sizing guide -- attests to a consciousness of the hoodie's recent history of peculiar reception. In a cardigan or a crew neck, this model is just another model. In the hoodie, he is a folk demon and a scapegoat, a political symbol and a moving target, and the system of signs that weighs this upon him does not make special distinctions for an Italian cashmere hoodie timelessly designed in heather gray.

Watching Beyoncé's recent video for "Formation" with its set piece showing a Black child in a hooded sweatshirt disarming a rank of riot police with his dance moves, most Americans grasped the outfit as a rhetorical device serving a dreamlike declaration about protest and civil rights. During the N.F.L. playoffs, football fans saw the quarterback Cam Newton, the locus of a running dialogue about Blackness, wear hoodies to interviews, and they read tweets that called him a "thug" for it.

The boxing movie "Creed"-- starring Michael B. Jordan opposite Sylvester Stallone, who made the hoodie a fixture in "Rocky"(1976) features rousing scenes of Jordan jogging across Philadelphia in a gray hoodie. The transfer of the garment from the old white champ to the young Black contender plays as an echo of the film's broader racial politics. At the computer, prodded out of the rhythm of browsing, I tried to imagine the meetings that led to this catalog model being placed in this hoodie, in the vacuum of commercial space.

Beyond the usual earnest discussion of the styling of his pushed-up sleeves and the asymmetrical dangle of his drawstrings, there had to have been delicate conversations, informed by H.R. policy and P.C. etiquette, straightforward aesthetic concerns and knotty social ones. It is impossible that the production designers were ignorant of the ghost of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed 17-year-old fatally shot four years ago while wearing much the same thing. Did the model present a distraction from the reality on the streets? Did the art director start feeling somehow guilty for even considering such a question? The choice to put the kid in the picture must count as a modest political act, given the rich absurdity of the codes pertaining to a harmless piece of clothing.

The hooded sweatshirt emerged as a pop political object after decades of mundane hard work. In the 1930s, the company now known as Champion Athletic Apparel began turning them out to keep football players warm on the sidelines, also attracting business from men who operated backhoes and cherry pickers and forklifts -- the forefathers of style for the guys who top their hoods with hard hats turned backward.

But the hoodie did not warrant enough consideration to earn its diminutive nickname until after it was processed by B-boys, graffiti artists and break dancers in the '80s. Youth culture did the work of tugging it from the sphere of sportswear, where clothing exists to enhance performance, into the world of street wear, where clothing is performance in itself. By the 1990 release of the video for "Mama Said Knock You Out". with LL Cool J styled as a boxer in his corner, his lips visible beneath a hood that shielded his eyes, the hoodie had accomplished its transformation into an element of style.

Like their peers in the suburbs, bundled up on BMX bikes or skateboarding in sweatshirts with the logo of Thrasher magazine, a generation of hip-hop kids found the hoodie suitable for the important adolescent work of taking up space and dramatizing the self. There was and is a theater of the hood: pulling it up with a flourish, tugging it down to settle in its energetic slouch. The hood frames a dirty look, obscures acne and anxiety, masks headphones in study hall, makes a cone of solitude that will suffice for an autonomous realm. And if, in its antisurveillance capacity, the hood plays with the visual rhetoric of menace, it is heir to a tradition in teen dressing stretching back to the birth of the teenager, when he arrived fully formed in leather jacket and bluejeans.

The cover of the Wu-Tang Clan's first album catches the mood: Members of the group wear black hoodies and white masks, as if to abduct the listener into a fantasy of ninja stealth. But this was just a prologue to an era in which the hoodie became at once an anodyne style object and a subject of moral panic, its popularity and its selective stigmatization rising in proportion. A glance at almost any police blotter, or a recollection of the forensic sketch of the Unabomber, will confirm the hoodie as a wardrobe staple of the criminal class, and this makes it uniquely convenient as a proxy for racial profiling or any other exercise of enmity. The person itching to confirm a general bias against hip-hop kids or crusty punks imputes crooked character to the clothing itself.

Which brings you to the transcript of the 911 call made by Trayvon Martin's killer. Dispatcher: "Did you see what he was wearing?" George Zimmerman: "Yeah. A dark hoodie, like a gray hoodie." Triv­ial details can bear serious import. Surely there would have been demonstrations after the killing and the killer's acquittal regardless of what the victim wore. As it happened, those demonstrators -- legislators on chamber floors, marchers in the street -- picked up the sweatshirt as an emblem, donning hoods in solidarity. Instantly a symbol aggrieved at having to be one, the hoodie was jolted into a curious space: Where the basic hoodie means to defend against the elements, the protest hoodie seeks to offend the right people.

In the paranoid view of stodgy shopkeepers, the hoodie is to be feared for extinguishing individuality; in its politicized life, it mutes identity to signal alliance, not unlike a resistance group's uniform. All that potential subtext is attached to a generally evocative item of clothing. The white working-class hoodie still glows with the Rocky Balboa ideal of grit and tenacity. The yoga-class hoodie is sold on a promise of snuggly virtue that may explain why in Saskatchewan they call the thing a "bunny hug." The tech-sector hoodie made default by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg carries on the garment's proud juvenile tradition of informality and defiance. Once perceived as an affront to professionalism, it has since settled in as a convention.

In January, there emerged a debate in the business press regarding the rituals of dress in the tech industry and their relationship to the field's hospitableness to women. The argument proceeded in an article on Quartz headlined "The Subtle Sexism of Hoodies" and in counterarguments suggesting, for instance, that "hoodies represent a rejection of old ideas and an openness to new ones." I was struck by the ready acceptance of the notion that a Silicon Valley hoodie was not just a prerequisite in its field, like Gucci loafers on Wall Street, but also a costume of dominance. Its visual strength abets its powers as a cultural marker, needing just a nudge to create its own contexts.

You must have seen a sitcom or TV commercial in which Black actors wear hoodies in new millennial colors -- mustard, maroon -- to portray coders. In a current General Electric ad, for example, the costume functions as characterization, and the cheery color of the cotton somehow trumps that of the skin in terms of mass iconography. But the ascent of casual wear does not quite disguise the unchanging strictness of social codes, and the hood continues to frame matters of class and race in ways that tend to satisfy the interest of power. The lingering question of the hoodie is simply: Who enjoys the right to wear one without challenge?

This article by Troy Patterson was first published on 6 March 2016 in The New York Times Magazine.