The first hoodie I owned wasn’t even mine, properly speaking. My dad found it abandoned at a soccer field: an old “University of Virginia” sweatshirt, navy blue faded to the color of dingy dishwater, cuffs blown out, collar fraying, the print cracked like dry mud. It looked less like school spirit than something a groundskeeper had been buried in. Naturally, I loved it. I wore it constantly, a small, threadbare signal that I belonged to something larger and more prestigious than my own gawky self. In photos from that era, I resemble a ragamuffin who vandalized a laundry line. It didn’t fit right, it certainly didn’t flatter, but it was comfy and it looked rakishly degenerate, and what more could a kid reasonably ask?

By middle school, the hoodie had become less mascot costume and more psychological technology. There was the blue A&N one with the Olympic rings on the breast: thicker, denser, decisive. I was a shy, sensitive kid, probably somewhere along the shallow end of “the spectrum,” as it’s called these days, and I took to that hoodie the way a startled turtle takes to its shell. Pull the hood up, and the world moved a half-step away. Cafeteria noise dimmed. Hallway traffic flowed around me like water around a piling. Teachers saw a quiet boy in a sweatshirt; I felt like a small, mobile bunker. That was when I first grasped that the right hoodie isn’t just clothing; it’s a negotiated truce with the world.

Then came the dissolute years. My young adulthood was morally upright but sartorially promiscuous. I slutted my way around the hoodie world with no brand loyalty whatsoever. L.L. Bean, Champion, Gildan, Russell; if it had sleeves and a hood and didn’t cost much, I was game. I tried on college-branded hoodies from schools I’d never set foot in. I wore band merch I only half-liked. I let girlfriends “borrow” hoodies that never came back and acquired others that had clearly been liberated from some ex-boyfriend’s closet. It was a parade of adequate warmth and approximate fits, a blur of slightly-wrong weights and slightly-off-center-but-cool logos. Some hoods swallowed my head like a monk’s cowl, blotting out peripheral vision. Others barely qualified as hoods at all, more like symbolic flaps that surrendered at the first hint of wind. It was fine. I was young. I didn’t know what I wanted in life or in loungewear.

Adulthood, with its mortgages and joint checking accounts, brought a certain sobriety to the hoodie section of the closet. I started to notice that some garments were clearly better at particular jobs. Lightweights like Weatherproof Vintage from Macy’s were good for slightly chilly late summer/early fall days. Gym brands like Iron Tanks, Rogue, and Gorila (one L, on purpose) took their turn under the barbell, soaking up sweat and chalk like they were born to it. Outdoor-gear types like Origin promised technical excellence in an innovative twenty-panel design, good for hunting in the morning, welding in the afternoon, chopping wood in the evening, and watching Netflix before bed. They were all good in their own ways, some even approaching superiority. But as U2 sang, regarding Bono’s own quest for the perfect upper-body athleisure, I still hadn’t found what I was looking for.

The conversion experience came, appropriately, in the gym. I overheard two guys talking while they warmed up on the turf. One of them was wearing a Carhartt hoodie the color of concrete. The other was admiring it with a fervor usually reserved for new trucks and bourbon. “Best hoodie I’ve ever had,” he said, and the list of virtues tumbled out: the way it fit, the way it wore, the way it shrugged off cold and abuse. This was not casual chit-chat; this was testimony. I listened, skeptical but intrigued, like a man who’s heard too many diet fads but is still slightly curious about this new one that promises you can eat pizza and ice cream and live forever.

Eventually I ordered one. Pulling it on for the first time was like realizing every other hoodie had been a rough draft. Carhartt, it turns out, has quietly solved the general-purpose hoodie problem.

The fit is loose enough to be genuinely comfortable and allow a T-shirt or base layer underneath, but not so baggy that you feel like a child playing dress-up in your dad’s work clothes. The fabric is midweight: substantial, not flimsy, but not the kind of thick, immovable armor that makes you overheat the moment you step indoors. It’s the right weight for almost everything: warehouse mornings, dog walks, grocery runs, deadlifts, and those chilly fall days when the air has opinions but not convictions.

The hood is a masterpiece of geometry. It comes up and over without squeezing your head or strangling your neck, but it also doesn’t fall so far forward that you’re peering out of a cloth tunnel like a medieval penitent. You can see enemies approaching from either side. Hoods on lesser sweatshirts either swallow you whole or give up halfway. This one behaves and even obligingly accommodates headphones or earbuds.

And then there’s the pocket. I had never realized how many pockets were slightly wrong until I encountered one that wasn’t. On the Carhartt, the kangaroo pocket sits exactly where your hands naturally want to go, no reaching, no shrugging. It’s deep enough to hold phone, keys, and the miscellaneous lint of daily life without feeling bulky, but not so cavernous that objects tumble around like dice in a cup. Slide your hands in and there’s no awkward angle, no need to hitch the hoodie up. It’s a small thing, pocket placement, but small things are what separate “fine” from “I will buy two more of these during Black Friday and hoard them like a dragon.”

The shape of the ideal had finally settled. It was as if, after years of sculpting clay torsos and lopsided marble nudes, a Greek sculptor suddenly got the proportions right and could spend the rest of his career varying the pose. Once you’ve found the ratio that works, everything else is commentary.

If this is a Bildungsroman, it’s a modest one: a narrative arc from ragged, foundling sweatshirt to a consciously chosen, well-designed tool. Part of growing up, I suspect, is learning to take seriously the things that seem trivial. The world will offer you no end of abstruse causes and abstract ideals; the body simply wants to be warm, comfortable, and free to move. A good hoodie is one of the ways you grant that wish.

Tomorrow, two more Carhartts are due to arrive, Black Friday tributes to my older self’s hard-won wisdom. I’ll slice open the package, shake them out, and add them to the lineage that runs back several decades. The shy kid who hid inside his hood is still in there somewhere, but now he’s got better equipment. If the soul’s progress can be traced in cotton/poly blends, mine has finally reached the chapter where the hero stops wandering and finds, if not a home, at least the perfect pocket placement.