The Week: How the turtleneck became a symbol of power

The turtleneck has long been a symbol of subversion and appropriated power for women. From a turtleneck-clad Jo Stockton jumping into a beatnik dance in a smoky bar in Funny Face, to Shiv Roy's "I will destroy you" turtlenecks on Succession, this garment, which was originally sported primarily by men, has allowed women to inhabit male-coded traits of self-sufficiency and swaggering authority.

Originally a memento of football days, the turtleneck began as a Letterman sweater back in the late 1800s, when male college athletes in elite schools like Dartmouth and Princeton wore it to represent their teams. By the 1920s, women were dabbling in the look, to the chagrin of fashion columnists like Mary Marshall, who in 1925 complained that the turtleneck, when worn by women, gave off "a certain air of toughness."

Indeed, in the decades that followed, the turtleneck became a counterculture fringe piece worn to signify a woman's nonconformity to traditional feminized gender roles. Silver screen stars like Marlene Dietrich and Katherine Hepburn wore turtlenecks among other traditionally boyish attire. The jersey turtleneck was adopted in the '40s when women had increased wartime responsibilities, then became a staple for the counterculture intellectual in the '50s, and eventually morphed into resistance wear for the women who marched in the civil rights and feminist movements in the '60s, a time when social standards were changing, and women were borrowing from men's closets with abandon.

"At this time, women were taking pants from men; they were taking pant suits and shorts. And they completely co-opted the button down," Deirdre Clemente, a historian of 20th-century American fashion, told The Week. "In the late 1950s so many women across so many different fronts of society pushed the boundaries enough to the point where women in the 1960s could wear a sweater that 50 years before was only worn by a rich man in Harvard. It's co-opting and taking something that society wants to be able to say who can and can't wear."

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