This year, because I’ve been half-heartedly hunting around for a specific item, I found myself memorializing what I think is my all-time favorite piece. In 1994, I took a long train trip that wound up at Union Station in downtown Portland, Oregon. Kansas City was one of the stops early in the voyage, and while I was there I went to a Goodwill store with a then-friend’s then-girlfriend and in that store I found and bought a deep, deep blue turtleneck that was made of the heavy fabric usually used for sweatshirts. It was, quite simply, perfect: It fit, the neck and the cuffs were form-fitting but not too tight, the color was glorious and it was warm. Before I had to part with it many years later, I wore that sweatshirt (or was it a turtleneck?) pretty much always except for on laundry day. Had I realized back then that putting clothes in the drier is a pretty sure way to destroy them, I’d probably still be wearing that creation, but alas, with only a single glob of threads connecting the neck to the body, I had to part with the turtleneck-sweatshirt combo. And I remember the day clearly, even now.
I’ve checked at various stores and online, and my search – if you can call it that – leaves me with one question: Have straightforward, no-frills turtleneck sweaters been outlawed? One of the problems with buying almost everything used is that I forgot how maddening the mandatory changing of styles can be. This year, someone decided that men’s sweaters should be crapped out with what’s called a shawl collar. Sometimes these sweaters are adorned with buttons but most of the ones I’ve seen simply have a chest-level gash where one half of the sweater goes one way and the other half goes the other and the entire thing culminates in a sort of quasi hood-type thing that dangles in the back. From the perspective of pure practicality, does that “shawl” keep the wearer any warmer? Does it make the sweater fit better? Is it a structural consideration? Or is it just a decoration?
Looking for a turtleneck made out of sweatshirt-weight material online was even more puzzling. Because I don’t buy much on the Internet, I almost never do searches for specific products, which is good, because I’m not sure what the point is, exactly. Type into a search engine the words “turtleneck sweatshirt mens” and if anything remotely along those lines turns up, please let me know. Because I found pretty much everything but. Cardigans, crewnecks, V-necks, mock this and mock that, button-down shirts, underwear, you name it. It made me wonder what sort of coding actually goes into the search engine algorithms. Although the marketing teams behind the search engine biz would love for you to believe that theirs is a world of pure precision, it’s one of the sloppiest experiences I’ve had in a long while. I put the words in different order and the same shit turned up, over and over, shit I didn’t want before, shit I don’t want now.
Which brings me, sadly, to the Gap, where there is no end of shit. That was the company whose logo was on the tag of my beloved sweatshirt turtleneck – or turtleneck sweatshirt – and it’s the tag that’s on a couple of other items that I really like, items I’ve been very careful to not ever subject to the drier. As I recall, that store used to characterized by sturdy construction, solid lines, buttons and zippers that stayed where they were meant to stay and a sort of no-frills tastefulness in general. What happened?
