Calls For Hooded Tops Ban After Shopping Centre Bans Anyone Wearing Them From Their Mall.

"YAY THE BOSOM!"

"BOO THE HOODIE!"

"CRY, THE BELOVED MAN U FAN."

Thug? This looks like Jon.

Will sunglasses be next since they obscure your eyes ?

Why don't they give kids somewhere to go so they aren't bored and hanging around these malls? This is the real issue.

New laws to tackle yobs and restore respect in society have been promised by Prime Minister Tony Blair. But will more legislation solve the problems, or just make them worse?

(I can't keep down my fascist urges here. Fuck the vicious thieving fuckers)

i've been asked to take off hats (not baseball caps) in bars before(i'm sure anyone who wears hats has) which is totally acceptable, otherwise what's the point of the cctv? the shopping centre also banned swearing, leafletting etc. it seems to be just the papers that are making it all about the hoodies

SAVE OUR HOODIES!

So, gargantuan London shopping centre Bluewater has decided to ban hooded sweatshirts. Always quick to spot a soft target, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott has thrown his considerable weight behind the ban, declaring hoodies as "aggressive and intimidating", which, coming from him, is quite something. Apparently the amateur pugilist and style guru was recently "confronted by youths in a motorway café” and the sight of their shadowy cowled silhouettes looming over his pie'n'mash has clearly been haunting him ever since.
While it's hard to deny that hoods are indeed used by dealers and thieves to keep their guilty mugs off CCTV, the hoodie is one the great inventions of the 20th Century and we must not allow it to be soiled with the grimy fingerprints of petty crime in the same way that the Burberry baseball cap has been made synonymous with football hooliganism and the advanced stages of chavdom.
Everyone loves a hoodie, it 's the beans-on-toast of the fashion world, a comforting, effortless, everyday classic, often reinvented by rarely bettered. From the WWII navy seals who first stiched drawstring hoods and front pouches to their smock tops to the Bush-baiting "Black Hoodie Mob" in Eminem's pre-election “Mosh” video, via Afrika Bambaata, Rocky Balboa, Kylie, Donnie Darko and even the Grim Reaper himself, the hoodie has become a timeless wardrobe essential. It has survived the affront of J-Lo and Juicy Couture's slimy velour meddling, it has even survived the deeply disturbing "hoodie beneath a suit jacket" look of Timberlake, Charlie Busted and their boy-band brethren. But this new threat is far more sinister: a pincer movement from youth culture's two worst enemies; politics and commerce. Enough already. It's time for hoodie lovers to unite and make a stand. That's why Dazed is officially declaring this Saturday National Hoodie Day. So don the most "aggressive and intimidating" hoodie you can find, get down to your local mall, strike your shiftiest pose, hold your hoods up high and just say 'No' to Hood-ism. See you at Bluewater.

what about when the hat is perched atop a hooded head?

D&C's riposte is a bit of a joke when you consider A) nobody complains THIS much about club or other social establishment dress codes, and B) who the fuck wants to hang out in Bluewater anyway? get one imagination kids.

Get One EImagination? Its a mall full of shopsand a 20 screen cinema and a cheap food court and plenty of stuff to nick/play with. How much of an imagination do you need if you live in Thurrock?

Is this just a British thing or is this happening every where? By this I mean this terrible way of dealing with problems?

Problem: Too many spotty little oiks chewing gum and using slang words in the town centre.
Solution: Start a club night for young people or even a youth centre or at least SOMETHING that might let them escape their home for a few hours and let them socialise outside of school. No, not a Christian youth group or an old fashioned youth club with skittles like you used to have in the old days. Kids be playing Playstation now. Even lowering the drinking age a bit if we must?
What really happens: Lets ban baseball caps and hoodies because that'll stop bored teens hanging around outside the VG waiting for their fake ID to come through the post. Then lets complain that our nation's children are becoming a bunch of lethargic, overweight telly addicts who have no concept of what it is to be a part of society.

Problem: Too many cars on the road, too much pollution, too much congestion.
Solution: Enforce cheaper and more efficient public transport.
What really happens: Make the roads smaller and raise the price of petrol in the hope that it will discourage people from using their cars while public transport becomes outmoded and disarrayed.

It's this solution of restriction rather than liberation that seems so ingrained in the way Britain is run. Instead of looking at solutions, councils and governments go for the shortgame by putting up balsa-wood barriers in order to entertain Daily Express readers until the next grumblefad (to coin a term) comes along.

bit in the guardian this weekend spoke to one of the hoodies, made me think this is too little too late - 'yeah i used to wear my hood up all the time last year *when it was fashionable*'

can't decide if what bothers me most is the fear != respect thing or the way they're starting from so obviously completely the wrong place and direction.

xxpost.

well, obviously the hoodies are the symptom and not the problem, but with youth criminality in general talk of symptoms and problems is more difficult. what is the 'root problem' and what should be done?

Pff, fuck teenagers, anyway.

A children's charity has hit back at a controversial ban on hooded tops by urging young people to boycott the shopping centre which imposed it.

HELLO, EARTH TO CHILDREN'S CHARITY!! YOU CANNOT BOYCOTT SOMETHING FROM WHICH YOU ARE ALREADY BANNED!

Spokesman Tim Linehan said: "Here you have a shopping centre banning people who wear the items of clothing that they sell at the centre.

"What happens to young people if they buy those items of clothing on the premises, are they not allowed to wear them on the way out?

erm, wearing clothing just bought from a shop?? Automatic arrest by the LAME PATROL.

it seems to me there is a genuine conviction among a very large proportion of people in this country (not just teenagers) that really no one gives a fuck about them, no one could ever care less, ppl are always on their back to meet school targets or whatever but not to find something they're interested in and pursue it deeply, no one they come into contact with is bothered about them for their own sake but only because they're a pest to/burden on the rest of society until they leave school and either go to uni or get a job, either way finally the govt can get money out of them. this is often true of their parents too, and theirs - now more than anytime before us there are more and more teenagers who were unplanned/unwanted (know is not same thing but frequently go together) who were themselves unplanned/unwanted, and so possibly were their own parents. people feeding their kids turkey twizzlers/mcdonalds/pot noodle, letting/making them watch tv/play playstation or whatever all the time also has something to do with this. if you didn't want your kid in the first place and that didn't change once they were born, you're not going to be willing to spend the time to do the best/healthiest thing for them, but rather the easiest, and if your own parents didn't know how to/couldn't be arsed to/didn't have time to cook cheap healthy food from actual ingredients, read you stories and in turn get you into reading (or whatever, replace this with football/clay modelling/biking/dancing/swimming/i dunno, just generally play with you and pass on all sorts of things from skills to self-esteem to the ability to interact with others to how to love and be loved) then you might not have those skills in the first place anyway.

eg my mum was a primary school teacher til she retired last year, she taught 9-11 year olds, and she said there'd been a huge increase in the number of kids who just didn't know how to interact or think for themseves. when they were asked questions they'd sit there open-mouthed and wait for the answer to be fed them rather than treating the question as a question. she rightly lays the blame for this with parents plonking the kids down in front of the tv to shut them up/entertain them, for whatever reason. the school is in a pretty shit area, a south wales coal-mining village, it only existed cos of that really and now there are very few decent jobs, mostly factory stuff, very low paid, with not much chance of an escape and plenty of ppl who aren't even thinking that they can't escape, but the concept never crosses their mind: this is their life, this was their parents' life and their grandparents' life and that's the way it is. pretty much anyone with any sense of the wider world gets out of there sharpish, which of course doesn't help.

small example, but not allowing kids to have stuff like skateparks is really stupid. we were reading yesterday in a local paper we picked up in bosham about these kids (and adults) who've been campaigning for a skatepark to be built on this disused land and they'd just found out they weren't getting it, they were building another carpark instead. this is just dumb. there's a skatething down near where i work in brixton and there are always loads of kids there on bikes, boards, rollerblades, whatever, they've let them graffiti it up as much as they like and, i dunno, whenever i go past they all seem totally wrapped up in what they're doing and not bored/troublemaking/whatever and i do not feel threatened in the way i sometimes do when walking past kids that collectively give you the eye. the bike shop is next door and they're often in there getting advice or bikes fixed, they all behave when they're in there - cos they get genuine respect and help from the ppl that work in the shop (brixton cycles, it is ace), they give them genuine respect back.

um, my thoughts are muddled and i have to go but this is something that concerns me deeply. there is a seeping deadly malaise across britain and no one is doing anything, or anything right at least, about it. our schools are fucked: despite having had a reasonably good time at school myself and with both parents teachers, i'm more and more inclined, should i ever have any kids, to school them at home/get together with others who don't want to send their kids to schools and do it ourselves. school has something to do with it but not everything. you're not gonna win people's respect unless you respect them too. this is an older problem than anyone is taking into account. ok, i really have to go.

It's the cultural resonance of the hooded figure as a traditional symbol of death. And the old fuddy-duddies who read the Daily Mail are somewhat closer to meeting the Grim Reaper than the rest of us, so I can understand them being a little touchy.

It doesn't mean they can be treated in the same way. You don't get litter in malls like you do on streets etc. It's both pro and con that the growth of contained commercial and entertainment spaces brings with it greater restriction of what you can do in those spaces.

It's also got something to do with the chav "phenomenon" that is "sweeping" the country* It's not as if hooded tops haven't been around since, oooh lets say, the dawn of time so what's the big problem?
The big problem (and it's an age-old one) is: sneaky media tactics picking up on the grumbles of a tiny minority, alerting these issues to a much wider bunch who really weren't too bothered in the first place, and then using this to generate a kind of mass panic. They've done it with horror movies, video games, rock music but now it is the clothing that appears to turn young people into troublemakers.
But as we know this isn't true. Sure, there are kids in hooded tops who listen to violent music and play violent video games who will cause mischief, swear, steal and even perhaps harass strangers. But I grew up with Nintendo, Anal Cunt and Doc Martens but I have never felt the urge to beat up an old lady and I'm sure the majority of bored teenagers today wouldn't want to either - hoodie or not!
In fact such bans are a form of inherent prejudice. Teenagers are universally scorned because they move around in groups, wear funny clothes, and are 99% of the time finding it difficult to adjust to themselves and their environments. On top of this they have nowhere to go after school so they will sit on a bench outside McDonalds or go skating outside Morissons. It's not that they like these places it's because it's the only place the authorities have provided, intentionally or not, for them to meet their friends. And of course a park bench or the steps outside the Co-Op aren't very fun or attractive places to be so teens are scorned more and asked "haven't you got anywhere better to be?", the reply normally being less than savoury - but who could blame them when Lucy's parents don't let Jason in her bedroom so they have to exchange chewing gum out on the street, or if Kevin's dad chucked him out the house yet again?
I wonder if people like Blair, Prescott and all the Express readers remember what it was like to be young? Or how they would feel if every time they walked down the street people would glance at them and cluck their tongues?

*As if overnight, normal well-adjusted townsfolk were transformed into Burberry-donning language stompers).

Emsk, I semi-agree with you however I am always wary of phrases like "now more than anytime before" and talks of waves of anti-social behaviour. I don't believe that this exists or that we are degenerating as a nation but I do believe that these so-called "problems" have existed since at least the end of the war. What I will agree with is that the incompetence of the nanny state and the needless fear generated by the UK media are what is causing these problems.

I have well-documented personal vendettas against clubs with dress codes but at the end of the day a club can reserve the right to do this for all I care. The difference with this is that firstly it is singling out a single group of people (i.e. teens) and tarring them all with the same brush. Not only that but they have government and the press behind them on this one. Suddenly it is socially acceptable to tell people that they have to dress in a certain way. And then we laugh at Kim Jong-Il telling his countrymen they cannot wear their hair long.

OTM.

People buy it for the free CD of "Hits While You Hoover" and the TV Guide. Also, believe it or not, a lot of people need to be told what to think.

Shame it's not HOOVER MASSIVE VOL IV OI OI

I'd say this was definitely their only real motivation.

Yeah, those poor bastards working in Asda...

so why can't a shopping mall do this? because they don't charge an entrance fee? Any private establishment really should have the right to decide who can or cannot enter their buildings.

why do kids even hang around in shopping malls? this isn't the 1990s anymore. stay at home and get on the internet! yay! be nerds like me.

GROOMER ALERT

i haven't really been to suburban essex really to be able to answer this. surely there'll be a nice park or two around though. a good ol' kickabout in a field anyone?

it's a bit daft isn't it that there's nowhere better to go?

Today:

Labour retreats on chain gang outfits
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/18655650

Q: Boiler suits, what if the teenagers are fans of Slipknot?

http://www.skippypodar.net/WebGallery/Miscellaneous/john-cena.jpg

I think the terms of this Bluewater ban are ridiculous (as I do with the whole trainers in nightclubs blah blah etc) but if they want to enforce it I think they have the right to, and nobody should be able to dispute it.

Or maybe there are better places to go and the problem really is with the minority of young people who aren't more interested in sports and active pursuits (skating etc.), or staying in and learning C#, .net and the like so they can get good jobs when they leave college (to give two examples of things to do that are 'better' than loitering)

(x-post, I also think stevem has been otm for this whole thread)

Studies have shown that Slipknot fans are all actually jolly lovely.

I should confess, i used to hang out in malls when i was a kid in suburban Sutton, but that's because i liked to shoplift (sorry ma).

Face it, teenagers wear silly clothes and if one is to assume that the reason a kid will spike their hair, wear a trenchcoat, baggy trousers, facial adornments, offensive t-shirts, impractical footwear etc is always for a nefarious purpose then one is missing the point by a country mile.
This isn't about security, it's about appeasing the now chav-conscious tits who read rubbish like the Express.

The ban is just a plan by Milletts to increase sales of snorkel parkas.

that's the OTHER slipknot:
http://www.knitting-and-crochet-guild.org.uk/slipknot/index.html

(all the best skaters are well out of their teens. Hawk is older than even me!)

In the same way that I wore DMs in the mid 90s, not to kick the shit out of poodles but because that's what all my friends wore, my little brother goes round with his hood up (even round the house). Yes you could use your hood and cap for nefarious reasons but targetting hooded tops as the reason for all the world's problems is really stupid.

Get back to Brussels, garlic boy! ;)

AGREED. why not tackle a problem at the route, rather than illegalising the symptoms. and i own lots of hooded tops. can i still wear mine? i look like i wouldn't hurt a fly (but DON'T TRY IT).

well obviously the minority(?) of young people are not the problem here. But the fact that there aren't enough other places around to interest the young people, with the result of enough young(?) hooded(?) kids there causing problems enough for a shopping centre to decide to ban them, is kind of sad.

Banning hoodies are a bit silly, though, if they want to hang out in a mall they'll end up wearing something different, and cause the same 'trouble'(?).

The real solution is not to make teenagers feel outcast but to provide for them. Where can kids go though? When I was younger I didn't do a whole lot of "hanging around" (although I did but I didn't see it as hanging around, I saw it as talking to my friends outside) but that is because I came from a very provisional household.
By 14 or 15 I found I was sick of staying in and watching Cheers on a Friday night so I would go to the bi-monthly indie night which was perfect for us because we could pull girls and smoke and dance in an environment away from our parents and other adults.
Now for some inexplicable reason they have stopped these nights (probably because they were so popular that you'd end up with a barrage of disappointed kids who couldn't be let in due to being sold out. I remember a bunch of us trying to sneak in round the back in order to get in, which goes to show that if we had more of this kind of thing then there'd be a lot more disillusioned teens having fun rather than getting bored and causing trouble in the streets.

-- this basically applies to everyone in society regardless of age. let's not give teenagers false hopes yeah?

heh, good point but :(
we could start giving a shit about people, oh haha no of course not what a stupid thing to think, that those running the country give a toss for those who aren't. the desperation of politicians running around before the election looking for policies that would be popular, rather than putting together a coherent structure of stuff they believed in, made my heart sink even further. sure sure it's been going on for however long, but it was so blatant, the desire for power for its own sake, this scratting around for ideas.

i dunno, i'm aware the government doesn't give a fuck about me or anyone like me, but most of the time i feel valued and cared about at least by my friends and family and at work.

i think a lot of people don't, and is there a way to address that?

"Emsk, I semi-agree with you however I am always wary of phrases like "now more than anytime before" and talks of waves of anti-social behaviour."

isn't that true though? wrt phrase "now more than anytime before" i was referring to the fact that there are more kids unwanted therefore unlooked after properly, rather than anything else, sorry if that didn't come across, am typing w/out checking for sense properly. i don't have statistics at my fingertips but even say 50 yrs ago it used to be a huge deal if you had a child outside marriage for both social and economic reasons, now not so much, not really at all, except in certain sections of society, rather than certain societies even (i think?)... obv it is good that we've slackened off a bit on the moralising, the church's hold is more tenuous/nonexistent and ppl can have kids without having to be eternally bound by authority to make it ok, but we do have eg the highest rate of teen pregnancy in europe (or we did last time i read metro anyway) and i do not think most of those kids want their kids.

christ, i am coming across like a hand-wringing milksop.

not a derail, but - in one of those booze-fuelled putting-the-world-to-rights sessions the "dogs need licences! why can you have a human being without a licence but not a dog!" argument reared its head and escalated a bit and jokingly i proposed sterilising everyone at birth but making it reversible, and all you had to do to have it reversed was ask, and they would do it for you, right away, without grilling you or anything, it would take 2 mins and be free, and everyone was laughing but suddenly sort of stopped and realised actually all of us thought this would make things significantly better and felt guilty but defiant of it too for thinking that... presumably only some sicko dictatorial regime would actually ever do this, and whoever did it it would inevitably end up being awful corrupt, and used as form of control even if it didn't start out that way but, uhh, where's my train of thought gone? bollocks. um. if that could be done, without all the attendant corruption and abuse, would this be a better place? surely this must've been covered in some future-dystopia sci-fi somewhere? (and does anyone know if you can do a degree in sci-fi please?) actually for the answer to matter you have to ignore hiv aids and a whole load of other stuff besides. but i wonder.

This doesn't quite solve the problem of daytime loitering/intimidation though, discos being a night thing.

No but the fact that this ban is in the papers and that it has been addressed by the country's top two politicians certainly makes it an unofficially big issue.

Dunno what voting turnout was like for young people at the election. I'm imagining it was an all-time low. The "debate" over this issue is only going to be sending one message to teenagers - politicians hate you. This is the government pandering to core voters again (under the guise of 'listening to the people') with attitudes that'll cost them nothing, all at the expense of a portion of the electorate who can't be bothered with politics anyhow. Strikes me that this is driving the wedge further still, but also - haven't young people sort of brought this kind of silly shit on themselves by not getting more engaged with politics? (I'm not specifically talking about kids, but this all seems to be so out of touch with how 20 year olds would think)

But if politicians hate you, why should you bother even taking an interest in them? How can you expect young people to cooperate if you regard them all as petty criminal scum who need to be swept off the streets?

See, this political attitude so shamelessly transparent that I can't believe it's taken till now for me to read such an accurate description of the recent election.

There should be more discos for teens but in my own experience 16 year olds didn't want to be in the same place as 13 year olds, as the presence of younger kids always made something uncool to the older kids, so that's a problem. Also these things would almost certainly attract trouble so you can understand the reluctance of venue owners to put them on

This is true admittedly. When I first started going to these indie nights as a 14 year old, it was for 16-21 year olds. They soon realised it was mostly younger kids going to this so they lowered it to 14-18 year olds and got rid of the bar. My attendance dropped but I understand the night carried on for a bit.

How much more trouble would come from a teenage club night than an adult club night if security is enforced properly?

Hyperbole yes, but not untrue. I'd argue that there's a very easy way to stop any problems caused by teenagers and that is to stop treating them all like criminals, and to start listening to them and helping them. Is it because they can't vote that the government and media can and will treat them with contempt?

Again, the problematic minority (as they're perceived) may, according to stereotype, actually find it difficult to formulate or articulate properly their views if given the opportunity to communicate directly with people in positions of power. Just protesting that 'there's nothing to do' or saying they want one thing but then not bothering to make use of it when it IS provided isn't going to get them anywhere. So how can they be catered for when even they do not know what they want themselves (not a crime, more a consequence of struggling to adjust to the world around you)?

http://www.dscp.dla.mil/gi/general/olddiver.gif

http://www.moviemantz.com/review_shots/catwoman.jpg

http://www.angelsandurchins.co.uk/pics/party/NoseGlasses.jpg

Did anyone see yesterdays Daily express?

from the articles:

"The guidelines say intimidating behaviour by groups or individuals and the wearing of clothing which deliberately obscures the face, such as hooded tops *or baseball caps*, will not be allowed."

" For this reason, the managers of Bluewater shopping centre in Kent have drawn up a code of conduct for the centre - a dress code, if you will. Wearing clothing that obscures the face - hooded tops, *baseball caps* - will not be allowed."

"it was banning youths wearing the "urban crime" uniform of *baseball caps* and hooded tops"

*except their lovely grandchildren.

Feral youths on 'rampage of fear'

Gangs of feral youths are rampaging in cities around the country, a senior police officer investigating an attack by a teenage gang has warned.

Chief Superintendent David Baines said the gangs "don't give a damn about the police or the criminal justice system".

His comments follow an attack on a father-of-four by youths he confronted outside his Greater Manchester home.

Phillip Carroll, 48, suffered serious head injuries after challenging the gang who had thrown a stone at his car.

Mr Carroll is critically ill in hospital following the attack near his house in Salford. His brother, John, said the area had been "terrorised" by youths.

The brothers were together working on the victim's Range Rover when the attack happened on Friday night at Grecian Street North in Lower Broughton.

Mr Carroll has undergone two operations and is "critical, but stable" in Hope Hospital, police said.

John Carroll, 34, who witnessed the incident, said youths were a problem in the area but his brother "refused to let them get away with it".

He said: "I just keep remembering seeing Phil on the floor looking as though he was dying. Thankfully where he is now, at least he has got a fighting chance."

Ch Supt Baines said abusive and alcohol-fuelled gangs of young people all over the country are hanging around on street corners intimidating people and causing trouble.

"They then go on to damage property or, as we have seen with Mr Carroll, to commit a very vicious and unprovoked assault.

"They are feral, have no parental control or respect for anybody and are often fuelled by alcohol."

He said the force was targeting the 10 worst families in the area but added, "It is not just individuals, it is the whole family. They all lead a life of crime and are a corrosive influence on the area.

"I have spoken to parents who are unconcerned that their 14-year-old child has been arrested for a serious assault or robbery. But they are concerned that they might lose their house."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/newspapers/18_may_2005/img/2.jpg

I wonder if the NME will be opportunistic enough to run a story on this stuff defending teenagers?

"young thugs RULE our town"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/kent/4561399.stm

I did. I watched the Mark Thomas COmedy Product, once.

the image at the top of the thread keeps changing haha

As pointed out above it's mainly both hip-hop/'urban' music kids and rock kids wearing them, but the latter don't tend to wear the hood up half as much, from what I've noticed. I'm not sure how popular hoodies are with generic townie kids as opposed to baseball caps which are as popular as ever with aforementioned hiphop fans AND townies (inc. those who've inherited the football-casual thing) but not rock kids/skaters quite so much.

haha yeah Steve, the first time I looked at this thread the pic was already a new cover and I was all "huh?"

That's almost funny in it's rubbishness (beekeepers don't go to Bluewater 'in costume').

True, and that is why I think it's not so much a banning of a particular subculture but more a banning of teenagers in general.

(Iannucci IS rubbish these days, isn't he?)

x-post

(and yeah that Iannucci show is shockingly bad)

Feral Britain: Thugs attack funeral car
A funeral cortege has been attacked by a teenage gang as the yob culture plumbed new depths. In the sickening attack, the thugs threw an 8ft-long lump of wood through the windscreen of the slow-moving limousine carrying women mourners. The incident is the latest in a hooligan explosion faced by communities across Britain

brett anderson/paul dacre -- have YOU seen them together?

hooligans are suicide bombers now?

xxpost

That's like saying "not everyone wears jeans". I'd say that about 75% of teens own some kind of hooded top that they wear regularly.

someone photoshop a hoodie on jon spencer plz

spontaneous combustion no doubt

A school could help restore the reputation of the notorious hooded top after making it part of its uniform.

Richard Haigh, principal of Coombeshead College, Newton Abbot, Devon, has criticised "hysterical" stereotyping of 'hoodie' wearers as thugs.

"Most young people are fine, upstanding citizens, and some of them wear hoodies. Why should they be tarred with this rather hysterical brush?" he said.

Bluewater shopping centre, Greenhithe, Kent, last week banned hooded tops.

This was part of a new code of conduct for visitors aimed at tackling anti-social behaviour at the complex.

"It's the behaviour that's the problem, not the clothing," Mr Haigh said on Thursday.

He added: "If you know how young people's minds work, the best way of encouraging them to do something is to ban it.

"The more fuss we make about hoodies and baseball caps, the more a certain type of young person will want to wear them."

Hooded tops have been part of the uniform at Coombeshead College, a 1,600-strong media and arts college, for two years.

Between 10 and 15% of students wear them, the headmaster estimated.

They are only allowed to put up the hoods when it is raining.

In a letter that he described as "tongue in cheek" to the Times on Wednesday, Mr Haigh wrote: "I am disappointed by the lack of subtlety in dealing with the hoodie problem.

"Follow our example and make them part of school uniform. How uncool does that make them?"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/newspapers/20_may_2005/img/3.jpg

I wonder how many more bad puns the press will come up with before this fad is over.

Manchester's Trafford Centre, the Elephant and Castle complex in South London and shops in Liverpool have also banned hoodies.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=15599732%26method=full%26siteid=94762%26headline=banned%2dfrom%2dshops%2d%2d%2dbecause%2dshe%2ds%2da%2dgoth-name_page.html

"It was good for Bluewater but I do not think the centre would offer advice to any other business as to how to run their services."

When you go to pick up said geezers from their digs, present each one with a complimentary hoodie and baseball cap. have each of your youthful volunteers wear an identical cap and hoodie. Emblazon these paraphernalia with charitable slogans such as "Jesus Loves Us All!"

Have your youthful volunteers help all the geezers into their gear. Invite the news media and tip them off. Bring the geezers to the mall, suitably accoutered. Meet the media. March to the offices of the management and defy their fucking stupid ban with the cameras rolling!

Checkmate.

I can understand them making kids take off the caps. I can understand them saying don't wear hoods up. But banning them completely is stupid.
especially as the same people could just wear tshirts or tracksuits or any form of clothing and still cause the same amount of bother.

I mean, the hoodie is the basic essential clothing I use to get around the very London-esque weather in this town. I'm not wearing a knitted sweater and carrying an umbrella the next time I'm over there, sorry.

Well, granted, it is %^$%^Exclaim#$%$%$ magazine, but from the Lady Sovereign interview I read, the article writer and Lady S make it sound like the entirety of the UK has declared war on "the hoodie"... I should know better than to make ass umptions based on that article.

I know it's only a matter of time now until it spreads to our joke of a shopping centre in my town.

Checkmate.

With added bonus that it would probably put the antisocial types off of wearing hoodies!

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/41138000/jpg/_41138786_nohatsign203.jpg

This is a nice hint at subversion here. People who engage in criminal activity should iconify things that are practical in daily life, like CAR or WALKING icons. Therefore cars or pedestrians will be banned from certain places, if the people who run the places are loonie enough.

Loving the caption on the top pic.