The Skirt Has a Hood and I Have Questions

I’m not a fashion skeptic. This matters, so let me be clear about it before I describe what H&M is currently selling. I stand outside boutiques before they open. I spend money on things that stop being relevant before I’ve worn them twice. I’ve been radicalized by mood boards at seven in the morning. I am, in other words, in no position to dismiss anything on sight.

And yet: H&M, as part of their Moschino collaboration, released a skirt with a hood. Not a skirt attached to a hoodie. Not a hooded dress. A regular €40 cotton skirt—with a decorative double-layered drawstring hood mounted at the top, sitting at waist height. The product description was helpful: Short skirt in light organic cotton sweat with a decorative double-layered drawstring hood at the top. All-round two-way zip at front, side pockets and ribbed hem at the bottom.

I looked at it for a long time. The hood sits where your waist is. If you wear the skirt in the conventional way, the hood hangs around your midsection pointing upward, accomplishing nothing for anyone. The only scenario I could construct where this made functional sense was a person whose lower body begins immediately below the chin—no torso, just a head that transitions directly into hips. In which case: fair enough, someone finally addressed that market.

Maybe it converts into something else entirely and I’m missing it. Maybe Moschino intended the hood as irony and H&M missed the note. Or—my leading theory—someone got a hood sample mixed up with a skirt sample at the factory and nobody in the approval chain wanted to be the one to say something. €40. If you figure out what it’s for, I’d genuinely like to know.