inshop.com: Naked Underneath: The Allure of Sweaters
VALERIE REISS
01/01/2000
The other night I asked a close friend why he likes sweaters so much — specifically women in sweaters—and his eyes lit up. “MMMmm… sweaters,” he said. I have known about his fetish for years but never his reasons. “When women wear sweaters, their bodies get comfortable, and that soft, relaxed feeling is so alluring. There’s also knowing about the warm skin underneath a sweater…” Tight sweaters too? “No, no,” he said. “That defeats the whole purpose.”
This season J.Crew has trotted out 35 new styles of sweaters for women and 75 for men (this is clearly not a gender-specific phenomenon). They (with the help of their frolicking catalog beauties) can make a piece of clothing that hides skin and swallows curves look like the sexiest garment ever made—in the most wholesome way possible. There are handknit shetlands, “springy” merino boucles, ribbed lambswool v-necks, cashmere twinsets, Italian mohair cardigans, shawl-collared pull-overs and boxy cotton turtlenecks. All of which exploit the Universal Law that applies to writing and skin-showing: Less is more.
My latest search for the perfect skin-warming, sex-appealing-by-not revealing sweater started in my step-sisters’ closets. All have migrated to warmer climes, and abandoned their sweaters in their childhood rooms. Justified by cold, the fact that I recently migrated from a warmer climate to a cold one (much harder) and the fact that they have ruffled through my shelves more than once, I began to search.
Some sweaters were obviously left for a reason—a thigh-length purple angora turtleneck with the price tags still on—but others were functional and decent. There were seasons-past cottons, adequate wool cardigans, even a couple of classic rollnecks, one ivory, one rust. But each one I tried on was so imbued with the energy of its owner that it felt too intimate to wear, as if I had dipped into the lingerie section of a vintage store.
I remembered then that wool retains heat, odors, essence. Women are notorious for “borrowing” their boyfriends’ sweaters. My friend Alison says, “I like to wear his sweater for a few days, give it back to him, then steal it again once it’s got “him” back in it.” J. Crew has new “Boyfriend Sweaters”: men’s versions shrunk to fit women. This is appropriation of an intimacy that cannot be commodified; we want pheromones, not “her-size” cable-knits.
People used to wear sweaters solely to stay warm. The Sweater Buff’s Web site—a site with hundreds of photographs of celebrities in sweaters—outlines three stages in the evolution of the sweater. First there was the ‘warmth factor.’ “Then fashion came into the picture and in some cases warmth became secondary. This is called the ‘fashion’ factor. But if you are a true sweater enthusiast, although warmth and fashion are important to your love for sweaters, there is more—we call this the ‘fetish’ factor.”
The Sweater Buff makes my friend’s love of sweater-wearing women seem quite tame when he describes his ultimate fantasy: the Sweater Room. “Imagine a room where nothing exists except for thick, fuzzy, furry, soft, cuddly, warm sweaters, sweater dresses and other knit garments. Nothing else except for utilities related to sweaters and knitting. Nothing at all.
Sweater Sites:
J. Crew: www.jcrew.com
The Sweater Buff: members.xoom.com/_XOOM/sweaterguy/sweaters