SNOODS


LUV - I have worn scarves. I have known scarves. They are problematic. There are two ways you can wear a scarf:

1. You can place a folded scarf around your neck then feed the ends through the folded loops to secure it, like a cravat. Or, you know, a noose.

2. You can wind it optimistically around your neck, then hoist your handbag, shopper and gym bag onto your shoulder and run for your bus, hoping that somehow the scarf magically won’t make a bolt for freedom, wrap itself around the tyre of a passing car and drag you down the road the way Brad Pitt dragged Eric Bana’s corpse across Greece in Troy.

As someone who currently sports a bruise on each shin from walking daily into unmoved furniture and has in the past (almost lethally) faxed her own hair to Phoenix, scarves make me nervous. A nice, low-maintenance snood, whereas, poses fewer risks. On it pops, you loop it once and then that’s it! It just sits prettily atop your shoulders, gently warming your neck, with no trailing ends, no clinginess, no autogarrottic asphyxiation.

By the end of last year’s work Christmas party, I had predictably lost two items of clothing: my snood and my shoe. Given that a) there was a free bar and b) the streets were glossy sheets of icy death, you’d think I’d have missed my shoe more. But no. Despite losing two toes to frostbite, it was my snood I mourned. Bitterly. I mean, I have eight other toes, but my snood was grey and crocheted with sparkly thread.

Snoods are brilliant, and anyone who disagrees probably only does so because years of wearing very thin scarves worryingly tight has cut off the blood supply to their brains, making them hate snoods and use words like “milquetoast”.
- Robyn Wilder


HAT - On a list of items of clothing that it’s difficult to get to grips with, I would place scarves - long strips of fabric, remember, which you merely put around your neck - at the very bottom. There’s a limited number of ways you can wear a scarf, which means there isn’t a whole lot to a) learn, or b) be put off by.

But, of course, someone somewhere decided scarves are just too bloody complex. The placing of the scarf about the neck, followed by the hellish task of chucking the end over your shoulder - that was one too many steps for this spoilt poltroon. So he/she created the snood. And called it “the snood”.

It’s difficult to know whether to be more enraged by the existence of the snood, or the fact that it’s called “the snood”. One thing I do know is that the combined effect of these two enragements is enough to make me want to grab every snood I see, hold it above my head, twirl it like a lasso, and fling it into the sun. While it’s still attached to the smug little neck of its owner.

In case you were in any doubt that a person wearing a snood is a cossetted milquetoast unable to tie their own shoelaces, I point you in the direction of the English Premier League. Snoods have taken off in football this season, because they help protect the pweshuss wittle necky-wecks of men who earn over £100,000 a week and drive diamond-encrusted Escalades.

This means that the snood is the kind of sartorial implement worn by a grown man who runs around for ninety minutes every few days - on top of training sessions - and still doesn’t quite feel toasty enough.

Snood-wearers do not deserve necks, let alone knitted comfort tubes to keep them snug.
- Stuart Waterman