Can we give the novelty Christmas jumper a holiday?
It is the Donald Trump of fashion: loud, ugly, offensive
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Your support makes all the difference.I kind of dread Christmas. I'm sure many people do – the enforced merry-making, the repulsive quantities of egg nog, the stress of shelling out a small fortune for gifts you'd actually quite like to keep for yourself (maybe I'm the only person who does that?). And the sartorial minefield.
I'll admit, I'm partly to blame for the latter: as a fashion editor, Christmas is the time when you encourage everyone to don the dodgier, showier extremes of the autumn/winter trends. All that lurex at JW Anderson and Christopher Kane? How about those gobstopper-sized sparkles at Prada and Balmain (H&M or otherwise)? Or maybe one of the Ziggy Stardust catsuits from Raf Simons' penultimate Dior ready-to-wear show? You can probably snap some of it up in the sale already, so it's not a profligate purchase (or at least, the price doesn't make you wince as hard as it once did). And, personally, I think lurex is for life, not just for Christmas. I habitually sport Prada's 2011 cashmere-mix version of the stuff for every day.
However, I hold no truck with the holidays' garment of choice: the Christmas jumper. Invented by someone with no taste, apparently knitted by someone with no arms or right leg, sported by those with little to no self-respect, and certainly none for the people forced to look at them, the Christmas jumper is a seasonal blight.
The novelty Christmas jumper is the Donald Trump of fashion: loud, ugly, offensive. And, like Trump, it's inexplicably gaining popularity in the US, where “Ugly Sweater” parties proliferate between Thanksgiving and New Year, devoted to cool types trying to outdo each other in festive irony.
I often wonder if retailers' offers of Christmas jumpers are intentionally ironic? I doubt it. There's just something about Christmas that makes people long to don their garish apparel. Even the snappiest dressers have a Yuletide jumper lurking in dark corners of their wardrobes, crackling with pent-up static electricity and refusing to biodegrade, as acrylic so often does. We all assume they'll be a laugh to spot – but in actual fact, they just make us look like a laughing stock.
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