Why You Need a Pair of Nice Gloves
Reasons include: remixing looks, sex appeal, no-tech, and ultimately respecting yourself.
Today for #NEVERWORNS, I’m talking about why you ABSOLUTELY NEED a pair of gloves. As always, we love the ladies..market by the killer Anny Choi of @themarketeditor and editing by la Emily Farra. PS. I skipped last week because I was in Copenhagen shooting a #NEVERWORNS. More on that later…for now, subscribe to the Substack, watch the YouTube, and buy #NEVERWORNS clothes here if you want to get freaky! PPS. Doing a BIG LIVE in-person auction with James Veloria this Saturday Feb 11 at 11am. MOVE over Sotheby’s.
I was recently on Instagram browsing and voila, the vintage dealer @harlemshautest posted a few pairs of deadstock Baby Phat gloves. Those mint condition gloves were delicious even from the screen: they were crafted in silky butterscotch leather and trimmed with baby blue-dyed rabbit fur. That Kimora Lee Simmons curvy cat logo was embroidered in that same icy blue hue on top. $90 later, they were mine.
Part of me felt that I should be mortified. The amount I’ve spent on accessories recently feels insane (at least to me): those Italian frames in Milan, these gloves. But these gloves offer up something incredible that even the most expensive, sought-after bag can’t achieve. Gloves are fundamentally utilitarian—even necessary—as they are intended to be worn when you’re cold. But covering those 10 precious phalanges for practical reasons comes with a micro world of fantasy and fun. In this case, these Baby Phat gloves were like a dessert on my get-up: that sweet, sweet Werther’s Original leather and that nuclear cotton candy fur. They were especially evident when I wore them to bike to a shoot. My en route look was sterile-corporate: a black leather Gucci coat I got from The RealReal with a sold-my-shit credit and a pair of pinstriped trousers. Nothing to write home about. But the gloves added some freak to my outfit and people on set loved them: I even wore that buttery leather and that wink of blue fur in The Sopranos-style photo shoot.
Gloves, the littlest thing, became the most head-turning feature of what I was wearing. That could be the same for you, too. Do you feel like you’re sitting shiva in that all black outfit? (I sure did, or maybe I was just doing taxes.) Great, wear cherry red leather gloves with leopard print fur trim. Need to add a pop of something when you’re feeling down? Grab a pair of pink suede driving gloves. They’ll be a saucy little cherry top to take your outfit from drab to fab.
After all, gloves are the manicure of outfits, the final put-together moment, which I find to be the most seductive thing about them. One image that lives on in my screenshots folder is the one of Madonna pulling on her opera gloves from the music video “Take a Bow” (1995). In it, she plays the lover of a matador and wears a ’40s get-up: a John Galliano fall 1995 bitchy jacket with a wasp waist, lace lingerie, and a little hat with a mourning lace veil. But what drives the look home are her black Galliano opera gloves, a hint-of-nasty subversive in leather, reaching the tender part of the bicep. To put them on, she outstretches her arm as if she is reaching somewhere far beyond her or touching the fingertip of G-d herself. I know there is a satisfying physical reaction that comes with this moment because I’ve felt it, too: The fabric finally hits the fingertips and there is a secure snugness in between the web of the hands. It’s the final act of getting dressed and the body can physically feel that it is time to leave the house.
As we see in Madonna’s “Take a Bow”, the whole act of getting dressed is intimate, and gloves lend a seductive touch to the process. Seduction, sure, but the world of gloves also has a place in actual sex itself. Any cursory search of women and gloves will eventually lead to a fetish clip dedicated to women putting on and/or taking off gloves. Sometimes these videos are of the wearer in a pair of doctor’s gloves made to prod, poke, inspect, and insert. The wearer will stretch the rubber and let it smack their skin for a tinge of ASMR. My friend, the London-based writer Anastasia Fedorova who also works in the fetish sphere tells me over Whatsapp that “rubber and latex gloves are hot for people because they represent power and control, hint at getting your hands dirty and make people think of invasiveness.” The comment brings me back to the “Smell the Glove” scene—with a young Fran Drescher!—from This Is Spinal Tap (1984). And the commercialized concept reminds me of that Blink-182 Enema of the State (1998) album cover, the nurse’s naughty little smirk and the tug of a glove that always says: Sir, you’re ready to be examined.
Other fetish videos include more elegant iterations of gloves: opera gloves, lace gloves, gloves in every color of the rainbow. Fedorova taps a bit more into the variation of gloves, noting that “There is a lot of things people could eroticize about gloves,” she writes. “It could be medical gloves, leather driving gloves, or even weight-lifting gym gloves—it helps you get into a certain state of mind, role, or fantasy.” Well, that’s also fashion: We’re world-building with our wardrobes, and in this case, it can be around a glove.
I often think that putting on and taking off a glove is a titillating tease, and allows the imagination to run wild, thinking about what the rest of the package could look like. Glove removal especially allows for a peekaboo moment of undressing, a lil’ innocent glimpse of what’s to come! And the slower the removal, the longer the wait, and we know that’s always better.
Besides the fetish forum research, I went back into the Vogue archive and searched “gloves.” The most popular results span the 1930s to the 1950s. Wearing gloves was a thing in society, harkening back to the elite of BC years, specifically a pair found in King Tutankhamun’s tomb. In the ladylike early-20th century, upper crust dames constantly wore gloves, often in white, and they had to be changed a few times a day. As society shifted and women started leaving the house more, the variety of gloves changed. In the Vogue archive, I found articles like “Washing Leather Gloves” (1948), “News about Gloves” (1951), and “Gloves: The First From France”. (1949). I even saw an article “Summer Gloves” (1898). They were for all times of day (“afternoon” gloves), in different silhouettes with a bulky bell-bottom cuff, belted, or folded-over, in suede, silk, kidskin, goatskin, pigskin, and in colors with names like “battleship gray” and “mustard gold”. Gloves were a centerfold of design—and there were a cornucopia of options. There were some legendary creations, too. Who can forget Elsa Schiaparelli’s trompe l’oeil fingertip gloves with those red snakeskin nails from fall 1936? But times change. By the 1960s, gloves fell out of favor. Women were claiming their place in society, they needed their hands free to work and play, and stuffy bourgeois norms like gloves and little hats went kaput.
I never really saw gloves in later Vogue editorials, and I certainly do not see them now in the wild, unless it is bitterly cold—and even then, it’s probably a pair of bulky mittens. But in my Baby Phat gloves, I felt a certain unbothered elegance that could only exist in this tech-drunk era. In the National Geographic article I linked to earlier, Valerie Steele, a fashion historian and director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, offered a great dose of insight about what wearing gloves meant in the case of social status: “The implication was you didn’t need to be doing anything.” And that is sort of what followed when I wore my gloves: Wrapped in my delicious caramel leather, I couldn’t use my phone, so I took out a book and I simply sat on the subway. No Quasimodo-ing over my screen, clicking endlessly through a perverted stream of articles from The Daily Mail. That layer of fabric offers a much-needed—and very chic—separation from me and tech, and translates that old world elegance in a new way.
But of course, there are glove loopholes, and I hate them both physically and philosophically. Those hackjob gloves missing fingertips, or those gloves with the different-colored finger pads that work with touchscreens. To me, they are a late capitalist signifier that society is crumbling. I talked to my friend Steff Yotka who was in Paris recently for men’s fashion week. “Here’s a statement on how sad I am: During men’s in Paris, it was so cold and I didn’t bring any real coats so I went to Zara and brought fingerless gloves because I ‘had to work’ and couldn’t wear real gloves, even tho it was 28 degrees.” She then sent me a photo of the two bumbling idiot burglars from Home Alone (1992) in their threadbare fingerless gloves, nearly identical to hers
I realized there were times in my life when I became so attached to my phone, I thought I needed to use it in frigid temps, and wearing gloves never even crossed my mind. I don’t think it is only me—or I hope it isn’t. We are obsessed with urgency, and if we don’t send that email or answer that Slack immediately, the results will be catastrophic. (Or will they?) Even the possibility of frostbite won’t dissuade us. It’s crazy to think there are glove designs dedicated to the moments you find yourself standing under the awning of a Subway during a snowstorm to type an email about, like, a photo credit. I’ve been there. That’s chaotic and it makes me feel pathetic. I never want to be that girl again, frozen on the street with a huge sack of shit hanging off of my shoulder, desperately trying to type an email about nothing with those stupid cut-off fingertip gloves—or no gloves at all. What was ever so urgent?
I’m understanding now that nothing was or is ever that urgent. Even when it feels like no big deal to remove my gloves to write an email, it is a compromise. Ultimately, a glove’s banal purpose is to keep you warm, but that boring reason is also why they are seductive: The wearer respects the gloves’s intentions—and ultimately, themselves. There is nothing hotter than that. So, go buy a great pair—and please, keep them on.
I love it, gloves (and I mean proper ones like the above with five nicely shaped fingers each, not utilitarian gorp/mitten type ones or Home Alone burglar ones) basically do for your hands what seamed stockings do for legs - nominal warmth, molto sex appeal.
Those baby phat gloves!! Just purchased 😅