Ugly Christmas sweaters are suddenly all the rage
Andrea Simakis
The Plain Dealer, 12/15/10
The price tag says it all: "Butt-ugly patchwork Xmas sweater -- $18.50."
"We can't keep 'em in the store," says Rita Pahl, bustling around behind the counter at Flower Child, a vintage store on Cleveland's Clifton Boulevard.
"They're flyin' outta here like hot cakes!"
In an inexplicable twist of sartorial fate, the tasteless Christmas sweater, an item as reviled and ridiculed as the holiday fruitcake, is having something of a renaissance.
The tackier the better.
Local resale shops -- staffed with workers who remember the days when they couldn't give away the pilling, polyester nightmares festooned with applique snowmen and reindeer and candy canes -- are experiencing something of a drought.
"Last year, you could find 'em all over the place," Pahl says. "This year, for some crazy reason, they took off."
Pahl had to plumb her "untapped resources" to outfit Fox 8's Kenny Crumpton for his emcee duties at an ugly-Christmas-sweater happy-hour party held at the Garage Bar last week. In addition to drink specials -- $5 martinis! -- the event boasted prizes for "the most obnoxiously ugly Christmas sweater!"
Pahl's secret stash paid off: Crumpton played host in a tomato-red, eye-stinging wonder covered with Dalmatian puppies.
"Fit him like a glove," she says with pride.
Fashion trends come and go, and come again, but the modern-day origins of the godawful sweater can be traced to Bill Cosby. As Dr. "Cliff" Huxtable on his 1980s hit sitcom "The Cosby Show," the avuncular comedian favored knitted pullovers with clashing colors and Rorschach test patterns. "Cosby sweater" entered the country's vernacular and came to mean a garment so loud and nauseating that those encountering it would be tempted to reach for earplugs and Dramamine.
The Cosby sweater -- and the holiday version of the look -- eventually went into donation bags along with the electric-blue leg warmers, acid-washed jeans and Huey Lewis cassettes.
"In the mid-to-late '80s, they were really, really big," remembers Flower Child's Pahl. "And then they kinda died off a little," she says, especially after landing on countless "what not to wear" segments on the "Today" show" and similar arbiters of middle-class style.
Once the province of dowager aunts, clueless dads and craft-fair-loving grannies, the festive, "made in China" monstrosities are chic again, thanks to high school and college students with a taste for the ironic. And now, as they did with the Honda Element and Facebook, adults have co-opted the trend, throwing their own kitschy sweater soirees for grown-ups.
At the Salvation Army store in Strongsville, three 18-year-olds peruse the offerings in the "seasonal" rack with a concentration usually reserved for sussing out winter formals, rejecting finds deemed not hideous enough. Two weeks before Christmas, the pickings are slim.
Jackie Dileno, a freshman at Ohio State University, liberates a long, black knit vest and holds it aloft, inspecting it in all its gruesome glory: It is ornamented with applique hats and gloves topped off with long tassels made of yarn. If you wore the sweater near a cat, the animal would climb your leg and bat at the ornamental trim.
Her friends, Allison Barwacz and Kelley Burch, gasp and nod in approval, while a nearby shopper, clearly in the market for such a treasure, looks on with naked envy.
They're expert at finding the worst of the worst, as they've been going to ugly-sweater parties "probably since junior year [of high school]," Dileno says, meaning about three years ago.
Another customer unearths a brown cardigan dotted with every iconic Christmas image imaginable -- snowflakes, Santas, stockings, snowmen, reindeer, gloves and ice skates. It was made, according to its label, at "Studio Fa La La." Barwacz, at home in Parma from Ohio University, eyes it appreciatively. "It's great," she says.
While high-end vintage stores are reaping the benefits of the demand and charging as much as $25 per, bargain hunters will find the best deals at the Salvation Army and other charity shops, where sweaters won't run you more than five bucks.
Barwacz and her posse, purists all, pass on a maroon button-down featuring Winnie-the-Pooh and Tigger, the words "Let Your" stitched over the right breast pocket, "Light Shine" threaded into the left.
They also leave a fuchsia T-shirt, priced to move at $2.99, decorated with a baby Rudolph dressed in a hat and scarf and the line, "dashing through the snow" written in pink and green lettering. Better still, the "O" in the word "snow" is a plastic snowflake that lights up whenever the wearer moves.
A holiday fashion tip: Grab it before it's gone.
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