It’s not hard to spot a hoodie in Romford in east London – hooded tops have become almost as ubiquitous as jeans around the UK. So a new rule banning anyone from putting up their hoods in the town centre’s shopping areas has not gone down well with some.
“It’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” says Mohamed Amraoui, a 24-year-old prison officer.
Ski masks and motorcycle helmets are also forbidden, while surgical masks and religious garments are not. The initiative by Romford Business Improvement District has been backed by Havering councillors and local Metropolitan police officers as a measure against antisocial behaviour.
“It’s a debatable topic because stereotypically someone wearing a ski mask wants to make trouble,” says Amraoui, whose wardrobe at home contains dozens of hoodies. “But there’s a lot of diversity around here and people wear it for fashion.”
Hoodies have been a fashion battleground for decades. In 2005, several teenagers were given antisocial behaviour orders (asbos) to stop them wearing hoodies on penalty of jail. After the Bluewater shopping centre banned them that year, David Cameron used the issue to rebrand his party as “compassionate Conservatives” with his “hug a hoodie” speech. Now, antisocial behaviour has been rising again across England and Wales – or at least people believe it has. The Crime Survey for England and Wales shows that about 30% more people reported experiencing antisocial behaviour in 2020 than in in 2012.
Labour has made crime a key campaigning issue, and the government responded last month with an action plan. A laughing gas ban attracted most attention but there were measures on hotspot policing and extra funds for youth support.
There is support for the ban in Romford. Shopkeepers and workers at the Liberty, one of Romford’s four shopping centres backing the rule, are more supportive. Jon Lyme, manager of Select Tech, said the store had been “terrorised” by groups stealing iPhones and Apple Macs en masse. “They rush in and take what they can get their hands on, and they all have face coverings,” he said. Security patrols have been stepped up at the same time as the new rules were introduced, he added. Most customers have been happy to take down their hoods when asked, he said: “There’s just been one instance where I’ve had to escort someone out.”
The problem is that there is no evidence that banning hoodies works, according to Jon Yates, executive director of the Youth Endowment Fund.
“I don’t think it’s necessarily a mad idea, but there can be a real downside to banning hoodies,” he said. “Hoodies tend to be worn by young people, so it’s labelling a whole group as negative. It’s quite draconian to stop people wearing what they want.
“And there’s a danger that by doing something for which there’s no clear evidence, it’s a distraction from what does actually work.”
What does work, Yates said, is hotspot policing where officers simply have a visible presence. Evidence shows that crime reduces and does not move elsewhere, he said. Other measures that work are helping young people who have been arrested, excluded from school, absent from school, are unemployed or have been victims of violent crime.
However, Yates said there might be other good reasons to ban hoodies. Young people who have been involved in violence had told him clothing was a way to size someone up as a possible threat – ignoring people in smarter clothes or suits.
“In that context, banning certain items of clothing might disincentivise people coming somewhere to start something. But there’s no data, so if they’re going to do this, I’d say ‘please, please collect some data to show whether it actually helped or not.’”
A study of teenage students at a New York school in 2020 found that they were more likely to judge someone wearing a hoodie as likely to take part in illegal or socially rejected behaviour.
Dr Ashley Weinberg, a psychologist at the University of Salford, said: “The bottom line is that hoodies can act as a vehicle for activating biases – a sort of cognitive shorthand for discrimination.” He said it was possible that “in the absence of evidence, people who feel they have the remit to act invoke such biases”.
Other types of clothing have been banned across the UK in all sorts of contexts. Various supermarkets have banned pyjamas in stores, deeming them inappropriate for shopping in, and numerous schools have banned short skirts, or even skirts altogether, in more recent times.
Further back in history – after the Battle of Culloden in 1746 – parliament passed the Dress Act, banning kilts, trews and tartan to try to subdue the Scottish highlanders.
Sumptuary laws were created regularly across Europe from the 13th century onwards. Henry VIII was the only person supposed to wear purple or gold and silk, and the magistrates of Padova appointed fashion police who stopped several women in 1546 for offences such as wearing pearl earrings or having a gold chain attached to a fan.
The intention behind these laws was usually to make sure people did not waste money on clothes or pretend they had a higher social status, according to Ulinka Rublack, professor of early modern European history at Cambridge and the co-editor of The Right to Dress.
“They can also address what is categorised as antisocial behaviours – regulations against masking, for instance,” she said. But these rules were very hard to enforce. “They were often extremely unpopular and some were not implemented at all.
“Usually there was a lot of hope and enthusiasm about bringing in the legislation. But then the question is who is going to enforce it? Who collects the fines? It becomes very complicated and usually it evaporates. We have a flurry of trying to implement it, and then the authorities just give up.”
Romford Business Improvement District director Julie Frost said that they would be monitoring incidents so they can measure the impact of the study. But there remains some scepticism. Saleem Ahmed, an 18-year-old marketing apprentice, agrees that ski masks “look super-dodgy”, but he feels that simply being young makes him a target, whatever he wears. “You get looked at funny – it’s not right.”
He objects to not being able to wear his hood up in the town centre. “What if it’s raining?”
