I was invited to an ugly Christmas sweater party, but the sweaters always struck me as waste of money and bad for the environment. And I don’t own one. Am I allowed to sit this dress code out, or does that make me a Grinch? — Tom, Kansas City, Mo.
It may be time to redefine the Ugly Christmas Sweater, or U.C.S. (Let’s just go with the abbreviation.) After all, the styles we now consider typical for such garments — synthetic creations in the worst versions of red and green bedecked in holiday clichés — are effectively the equivalent of wardrobe tchotchkes. But they didn’t start out that way!
The “jingle bell sweater” first appeared on shelves in the 1940s and 1950s, and was mostly a sincere attempt to add some (OK, kinda cheesy) snowflake- or reindeer-adjacent themed cheer into a knit. The ironic versions we now know really began to take off in the 1980s, thanks to Cliff Huxtable’s signature bad sweaters in “The Cosby Show” and to the 1989 movie “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.”
In 2001 came “Bridget Jones’s Diary” and Colin Firth’s unforgettable entrance as Mark Darcy in a crew neck featuring a life-size reindeer face on the front. A year later, according to the “Ugly Christmas Sweater Party Book: The Definitive Guide to Getting Your Ugly On,” the Ugly Christmas Sweater Party (U.C.S.P.) was born.
At this stage, however, it’s all starting to seem a little less fun — and funny. Ugly sweaters have become one of the worst examples of disposable fashion: made, essentially, to be almost never worn, and most likely discarded, while at the same time being generally not recyclable (all that acrylic). Yet, this time of year, it often seems that even consumers who would not usually engage with fast fashion are welcoming its wares and starting to think, The cheaper, the better. Perhaps, because of that, the U.C.S., as well as its related parties, persist.
