The Sweater Vest Is Your Essential Autumn Companion

Forget what you know about the sweater vest.

The sweater vest is one of the great paradoxes of contemporary fashion. An obliging chameleon of any wardrobe, the garment is knitted together with a seemingly endless amount of ideas and personalities: It’s both your primary school geology teacher and Brad Pitt in the 1990s. It’s Donald Glover in Gucci, and Carlton Banks on The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air.

Revelling in its contradictions, the sweater vest is again seeing a resurgence on the world’s runways, with tastemakers like Harry Styles, Ryan Gosling and Tyler, The Creator all advocating for its use beyond the golf course.

With the weather becoming more temperamental, it’s time to meet your new autumn companion: the sweater vest.

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Your New Best Friend
For those of us still slowly acclimatising to life after lockdown, the sweater vest is proving to be the ultimate sartorial security blanket. A simple transition from the beloved hoodies we’ve all crawled inside over the past 12 months, it shares some of the familiar material and aesthetic characteristics of your core wardrobe: it’s cosy, warm, and made with the kind of cotton and wool materials that instantly puts you at ease.

A durable choice for the increasingly unpredictable weather patterns of autumn, the sweater vest not only presents a viable, utilitarian option, but can also adjust the lens on your look, bringing a more sophisticated edge to your laid-back leisurewear.

Although the sweater vest has been at the forefront of women’s runways and couture for quite some time, the underdog item took a lot longer to make a mark in men’s fashion. However, once the sweater vest phenomenon hit, it was hard to ignore.

Case in point: Harry Styles.

Harry’s brazen adoption of the sweater vest has been one for the ages. Originally rolling up to Saturday Night Live with a sleeveless wool sweater adorned with sheep, Styles paid homage to Princess Diana’s iconic red sweater, and provided a watershed moment for the sweater vest 2.0. Routinely pairing his vests with 1970s-style flares, Harry's audacious retro-modern mashup served up an influential look that largely spun the sweater vest into existence for men again.

Now, others like Tyler, The Creator, Donald Glover and Ryan Gosling are all spinning the cyclical wheel of fashion once more, exhuming the legendary shots of Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow in the 1990s, and hitting rewind on Chandler’s earnest application in Friends.

But it’s not just the old guard and the arbiters of ‘Hollywood cool’ defining the parameters for the sweater vest. TikTok, the certified cultural barometer and Internet-filter, has been inundated by thousands of short-form styling tips for the younger crowd, as search terms skyrocket across the World Wide Web.

Detailing everything from formal tailoring to laid-back leisure, these videos further evidence the multitude of options you have at your disposal when it comes to the sweater vest (hell, some of us are even bare-skinned beneath!).

Sewed from a broad history of pop culture, high fashion, ironic and unironic geek, the sweater vest is right there ready for you to define it.

To check out all the latest in men’s fashion, head on over to THE ICONIC.

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