'Those are some heavy hangers’
In cold climes, men often return to the comfort of their compost heap. Freud would probably say this had something to do with incest, but the the biological drive to slide one’s hands below the waistband is, in fact, a Neanderthal’s instinct: a pleasure principle that releases all sort of happy and (really quite festive) hormones for the man in question. Central Cee, for example, was so cold at last week’s Fashion Awards that his frostbitten fingers were near-magnetised to his groin. It’s a very normal, very natural phenomenon that Kendall Jenner actually paid homage to earlier this week, when she wore a leather bomber fronted with testicular padding while on a family ski trip to Aspen.
Which is to say: what’s stopping you from dressing like an engorged ball sack? Hailey Baldwin Beiber and Taylor Russell have all been proponents of Jonathan Anderson’s scrotum jacket – a bulbous, lambskin coat with plump pockets and an elasticated waist – that Vogue has deigned this winter’s “must-have” item. Needless to say, mainstream fashion acolytes are less convinced, crowding onto Jenner’s Instagram to express their confusion. “Those are some heavy hangers,” one person wrote, while other eagle-eyed commentators said things like “that looks like testicles,” “not the b***sack jacket,” etc. It compounds a recent tradition of genitalia-dressing: fashion writer Emily Kirkpatrick coined the term pussy ruffle to describe the Saint Laurent gown that Lily Collins wore to the Emily in Paris premiere earlier this month.
Of course, it’s unlikely that Anderson and Anthony Vaccarello were drawing inspiration from reproductive organs when designing their most recent collections but people love to map their own lurid desires onto luxury clothing. So much so, in fact, that these seemingly normal jackets – which don’t massively look like testes but kind of look like them – have been reported on websites like The Daily M*** with the inclusion of beautiful sentences like “Jenner’s puffy coat, paired with her hands in her pocket, made it look like she had large, sagging breasts.” Thoughts and prayers go out to the likes of Cathy Horyn, Robin Ghivan, and Tim Blanks, who might never achieve such faultless prose.