All About the Turtleneck, Fashion’s Control Mechanism (2024)

Kelsey McKinney Explains the Sweater That Subverts and Protects

Protection has been the turtleneck’s purpose since its invention. Sometimes it functions literally, sometimes metaphorically, sometimes both at once—it all depends on the context in which it’s worn. For centuries, the turtleneck was purely practical. It dates back to medieval Europe, when knights wore it underneath chainmail to prevent neck abrasions. It remained utilitarian throughout the 1800s, meant for factory workers and athletes—roles occupied almost exclusively by men.

As Patricia Campbell Warner writes in her book When the Girls Came Out to Play: The Birth of American Sportswear, the turtleneck began to appear on women around 1900, when “college girls borrowed ideas from their brothers, stealing their turtlenecks.” She wrote that “such sensible clothing was never allowed for public wear by the male establishment.” Photographs of a women’s rowing team at Wellesley in the 1890s show the women in high turtleneck sweaters and, of course, long skirts.

“There has always been a certain air of toughness about the turtleneck when worn by women,” the fashion columnist Mary Marshall wrote in a syndicated column for The Cincinnati Enquirer in the summer of 1925. The implication was that that toughness should be avoided for women. It was too self-sufficient, too manly.
By the mid-1920s, the turtleneck had become popular for its form as well as its function, and this is when it began to take on a personality of its own. As Troy Patterson notes in The New York Times Magazine, London playwright Noël Coward became known for wearing the sweater, and the look was soon copied by other young men hoping to affect an air of rakishness.

Even as the turtleneck became associated with the creative intelligentsia, separated from its utilitarian roots, it remained distinctly, undeniably male. “The sweater was looked upon as the symbol of his virility, and the greater the width of the neck the greater virility he was supposed to possess,” wrote Henry W. Clune, a society columnist at the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, in 1932. Clune keyed in on something obvious about the turtleneck: you can’t deny there’s something inherently phallic about a round head emerging from a tight sleeve. So, it’s natural that the sweater became associated with a prototype of modern American masculinity: Clark Gable. The thick-necked silver screen icon hit the peak of his fame in the 1930s, and brought with him a stash of cream colored turtlenecks that framed his perfectly symmetrical face. He was a sex symbol who quite literally dressed the part.

At the same time, the turtleneck was also developing its reputation as a go-to for the countercultural intellectual. It had become a favorite of everyone from the Beat poets, to Samuel Beckett, to Juliette Gréco—actor, singer, close friend of De Beauvoir and Sartre, sometimes called la muse de l’existentialisme. As noted in George Cotkin’s Existential America, poet and novelist Marge Piercy claimed that she adopted Gréco’s style wholesale: ”black jeans, black turtleneck, my hair down, and a lot of dark red lipstick and eye makeup.” The turtleneck’s Beatnik association became so culturally ingrained that it evolved into a cliché.

In the 60s, as the feminist and civil rights movements stormed towards the center of public life, both literally and figuratively, the turtleneck became a kind of unisex resistance wear. In videos of women protesting for their reproductive rights, you will find the turtleneck. It was worn by black revolutionary women like Kathleen Cleaver, Elaine Brown, and Angela Davis, who paired their sweaters with leather trench coats, berets, and natural afros. Dorothy Pittman-Hughes and Gloria Steinem were photographed wearing cream turtlenecks, their fists raised in support of black power in the 1971 issue of Esquire. The turtleneck connoted a subversive, cerebral sensibility while also offering warmth and protection, its practical and allusive attributes combining to help establish the visual imprint of an era.

“Even to this day, the image of a black turtleneck, a raised fist, and an Afro can inspire controversy,” Marjon Carlos wrote in Vogue in January 2017. “Just look to Beyoncé’s subversive Super Bowl performance […] for proof of the movement’s enduring visual impact.” In that performance, her backups each wore a black, cropped turtleneck and beret. More recently, on the cover of GQ’s December 2017 issue, Colin Kaepernick, named Citizen of the Year for his activism, appears in a black turtleneck under a leather blazer, making the same connection.

Though the turtleneck still carries its 20th century symbolic freight, it is evolving into a uniform for personal resistance and quiet confidence. It is a cloaking device. In a short film about the turtleneck produced for the MoMA by designer Hana Tajima, it is noted that the turtleneck has the capacity to “undefine” the body, to render its wearer somehow removed. Its aficionados appreciate “the value of the void, where a focus away from the body becomes a focus towards the mind.”