The Black Death tore its way through Europe between the years of 1346 and 1353, believed to have killed half of the continent’s population. The Great Plague came in 1665, wiping out nearly a quarter of all Londoners. 1918 brought the Spanish Flu, infecting roughly one-third of the global population. And now, in the aftermath of Covid-19 — spreading through the streets of Oxford with a virulence that none of the above could rival — comes the latest instalment in highly infectious diseases: the college puffer jacket.
Historically, Oxford’s sartorial traditions have been (Bullingdon Club attire aside) relatively understated. The college scarf was a go-to, and whose demise is worth mourning. Its origins are believed to lie in the Oxbridge tradition of the annual Boat Race. Its distinctive vertical stripes were, depending on who you ask, born out of wartime fabric shortages, when strips of wool were sewn together rather than woven whole. Six feet of Saxony wool in your college colours: discreet, coded, and meaningful only to those already in the know.
The college tie appears to have emerged at a similar time, created in 1880 by Exeter College’s rowing team and later sold by Castell & Son of St Giles’ — the same establishment that claims to have introduced the Oxford college colours three decades earlier. The cufflinks completed the trinity. All of them were earned through surviving a gruelling admissions process. All of them wearable in contexts beyond a Tuesday morning hungover shuffle to a nine o’clock tutorial. Castell & Son is now the Varsity Shop, and it trades from the High Street. It still sells scarves and ties, but what it sells far more of is college puffer jackets.
Walk through Oxford on any morning of your choosing between the months of October and March and the evidence of this contagion is everywhere. Balliol on one chest, Exeter on another, St Anne’s on a third — each jacket bearing the embroidered college shield, the college name above, and ‘Oxford’ stitched below in pretentious typeface, just in case you were in any doubt about what city you were in. They retail at roughly £80, are made to order, and are 100 per cent polyester, marketed as ‘the perfect lightweight jacket for cold days.’ The scarf, it is worth noting, had been solving that problem for centuries, at roughly a third of the price.
A brief taxonomy of Oxford outerwear is instructive here. University-branded merchandise — the hoodie, the tote bag, and the mug with the Radcliffe Camera on it — is the exclusive preserve of the tourist, purchased somewhere en route between a tour of the Bodleian and Turl Street. College merchandise, however, is almost exclusively worn by students.
There is only one college that appears to be effectively inoculated against this outbreak. All Souls is an Oxford college that admits no undergraduates, electing its fellows through the administration of what is widely regarded to be the toughest examination in existence. You never see an All Souls College puffer jacket. More than that: I am not even sure they exist. It is, rather than bold declaration, the college’s impermeability that generates its aura. Genuine exclusivity requires no embroidered polyester. The puffer, in contrast, is what you reach for when your college’s prestige needs a little assistance. Take, for example, the colleges that have failed to produce anybody of note since the 18th century.
The Oxford puffer is desperate to be something different. It wants to feel like a rowing blazer.
Why has it taken hold so rapidly and viciously? The likely root is even older than Oxford itself. For an enormous portion of human history, exclusion from the group was as good as a death sentence. No protection, no resources, no survival. We are still unconsciously aware of this. In the first disorientating weeks of Michaelmas term, surrounded by strangers of what feels like effortless brilliance and insufferable self-obsession, the instinct to anchor yourself to a solid sense of identity is overwhelming. I suspect it is partly due to a basic desire to belong to something larger than ourselves. Tribal identity is comforting, and an animosity towards Christ Church is easy fuel for group cohesion.
But we’re not alone: the Americans are battling a college merchandise epidemic probably even more deranged than ours and have been for some time. More deranged because, absurdly, becoming eligible to wear the merchandise of, say, Harvard University requires one to have simply heard of Harvard University. It doesn’t take any greater level of affiliation than that. Unapologetically ridiculous. The result is a four-and-a-half-billion-dollar annual industry in which Nike, Adidas, and Fanatics compete to flog an enormous range of branded tat, including dog bandanas and — I promise you this exists — an Ohio State Buckeyes denim jacket. This jacket, you won’t be surprised to hear, is hideous.
The Oxford puffer is desperate to be something different. It wants to feel like a rowing blazer. To carry the weight of eight centuries of academic history. To silently communicate to passers-by, ‘I got into Oxford’. Despite what it wants to be, it is, in material fact, a polyester shell filled with recycled wadding. In this sense, it is considerably more American than its wearers would care to admit.
I should, at this point, confess that I own an Oxford puffer. In fact, I am wearing it as I write this. I am not even sure I remember how to take it off. Regent’s Park, if you must know. It is warm, extremely practical, and the moment you put it on, the logic of it becomes very difficult to argue with. The sense of belonging is instant. I assume this is how all successful social contagions operate. I am well and truly infected with this modern plague. I am, at least, warm.
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