It is probably the most maligned item of clothing in decades. Hand-wringers have been upset about everything from leather jackets to open-toed sandals, but with the hooded top they have taken outrage to a new level. Banned from shopping centres, schools and colleges, and generally condemned as both a badge and a tool of antisocial behaviour, the hoodie should be in trouble. Instead, it is fighting back.
A Save the Hoodie campaign has been launched, and the defiant voice behind it is Lady Sovereign, a jockey-sized pop-grime artiste from Neasden in London who has a single on the way next month entitled, yes, "Hoodie".
A slick campaign website boasts a hoodie style guide - choose between the Superman, the Kenny look (as in South Park) and others - as well as a hoodie history going back to monastic brotherhoods and those legendary Hoods, Robin and Little Red Riding.
Less conventional for a campaign website is the offer of "updates about new releases, exclusive competitions and music downloads". History does not record whether the Chartists or slavery abolitionists offered their supporters free ringtones or the like, but the odds must be against it.
The single, too, has a trick the Suffragettes missed: product placement. The chorus runs "fling on an Adidas hoodie and just boogie woogie with me", and if the promotional material is anything to go by, Lady Sovereign (aka Louise Harman) has quite a lot of complimentary tops in her wardrobe.
So how do the German sportswear makers feel about being associated with the sartorial scourge of decent, hard-working, law-abiding Britain? Aren't they providing encouragement to yobs? Alas, Adidas declined to comment, in a manner verging on the surly.
