Are You (S)mocking Me!?
A brief overview of fashion's weirdest jacket + styling advice and 18 recommendations.
There’s something so interesting about an inherently restrictive garment. And no, I’m not talking about those skinny jeans in the back of your closest make you choose between breathing and tying your shoe laces. I mean an item of clothing that has to be styled a certain way, that imposes its form on your body. Like a thick leather jacket - it has to be the final layer, you probably can’t wear a thick sweater underneath it, it’s not versatile but it forces you to get creative with how you wear it. The same goes for anoraks.
Arguably one of the most unpopular styles of light jacket - the anorak is hard to come by. Used interchangeably with the word smock, I consider an anorak to be any piece of pull-over outerwear, aka a jacket/coat that doesn’t have a full zipper/button-up opening. This makes them harder to layer with, harder to get on/off, yet in spite of that they can be the perfect choice for a number of situations.
Today I’ll be going into:
the history of the anorak,
its practical use cases,
how and when I prefer to style an anorak,
and 18 new anoraks/smocks I’d recommend.
And I’ll be following up shortly with a curated round-up of affordable second hand listings for y’all to peruse. If you enjoy this article, here are a few more for you to check out!
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Brief Origins
The word anorak is an anglicized version of the Greenlandic “annoraaq”, a term used to describe the thick fur/pelt pullovers worn by Inuit and Indigenous peoples within the Arctic Circle. The lack of front closure not only makes them easier to produce, but also far warmer as you don’t have to contend with thinner material near a zipper, nor the gaps created by a button closure. While the origins of this garment style are in extreme weather protection, the contemporary anorak/smock we see today gets most of its DNA from 20th century military developments.
