Ours is an age of infantilization and cosseting: our TV shows come with trigger warnings; our waistbands are elasticized; our vitamins, gummied. In order to experience this cultural softening at its most marshmallowy, a correspondent recently test-drove three wearable sleeping bags. Two were essentially roomy hooded snowsuits, and one was a regular sleeping bag, but with armholes, and an opening at the bottom. “They’re for enduring the cold,” the correspondent found himself explaining, as he walked around the city in them. “I don’t have a leisure fetish.”
Before wearing a bag to dine in one of the restaurant sidewalk sheds that have taken over many of the city’s on-street parking spaces, the correspondent arranged a Zoom call with the fashion designer Norma Kamali. In 1973, Kamali released her iconic sleeping-bag coat, which, over the years, has been worn by Rihanna, Lady Gaga, and André Leon Talley. Looking at the giant onesies on the screen, Kamali said, “Hysterical. Who makes them?” The night before, when temperatures were in the low thirties, she’d worn one of her sleeping-bag coats over a sleeping-bag vest (also hers) to an al-fresco restaurant in the Village. “I ate everything hot on the menu,” she said. “Soup, steamed mussels, bouillabaisse, hot tea.” At one point, warmed by the food and an overhead heater, she even removed her coat.
Asked for her own coat’s origin story, Kamali said that, one cold night, she’d been camping by the Delaware River (“I was a little bit hippie-dippie”), when nature called. “I wrapped myself in my sleeping bag, and as I was walking I thought, I’m gonna put sleeves on this when I get home.” The original iteration of Kamali’s coat, chic and slouchy-shouldered, teems with adventure: Kamali recalled that, in 1983, when her staff collected testimonials for the coat’s tenth anniversary, “many people said they slept in them, many people said they made love in them, many people said their cat had kittens in them. One guy said he stole eyeliner from Bloomingdale’s in his coat.”
Flush with a sense of possibility, the correspondent started wearing the two snowsuit-ish bags—a black Thinsulate-filled one from Hygger ($149, with a temperature rating of thirty-seven degrees) and a sky-blue polyester-lined one from Selk’bag ($99.99, temperature rating: forty-eight degrees)—around town. Everyone he crossed paths with had a take: “Oh, you’re Max from ‘Where the Wild Things Are.’ ” “You look like the kid from ‘A Christmas Story’ who can’t put his arms down.” “Could we get these on the homeless?” “That shit’s dope!”
If wearing the suits indoors for any length of time begot a clamminess reminiscent of boil-in-bag vegetables (or, for younger readers, sous vide), wearing them outdoors was largely delightful. The Selk’bag was ideal for a therapy session conducted, over FaceTime, during a walk on a forty-five-degree afternoon.
The correspondent then took the Hygger to Croasdaile Village, his mother’s retirement community, in Durham, North Carolina, where he helped her move out of her apartment. A silver-haired male resident stared at the garment nostalgically and said, “It must be nice to wear pants that make noise again.” Two women at reception asked if the getup was related to a Slanket or a Snuggie. At a donations center, where the correspondent dropped off several carloads of household goods, he asked an employee if he’d seen any wearable sleeping bags being donated. The employee answered, “We mostly get the lie-down version.”
Back in New York, the traditional sleeping bag with armholes and hood from Sportneer ($37.99, claiming a temperature rating of twenty degrees) stared at the correspondent like an unloved pet. The correspondent had napped comfortably in it one afternoon, but, when he’d unzipped the bottom and put his hands through the arm slits, the bag felt bulbous and dysfunctional, a far cry from the unstructured Issey Miyake vibe he’d been envisioning. On the Zoom call, Kamali had made a suggestion. “I would recommend getting a big belt to tie around the waist,” she said. “Cinch it up, hold it in, and you’re good to go.”
The correspondent decided to brave a wintry evening of outdoor dining. After studying a 2017 cover of Elle that featured Solange Knowles in one of Kamali’s fire-engine-red sleeping-bag coats, he turned his bag inside out (to avoid emblazoning his chest with the jumbo “Sportneer” logo), and cinched it with a red scarf, creating a Michelin Man look in draped dove-gray polyester. Walking in the floor-length garment required lifting it up, petticoat style, beckoning wisps of arctic air to his lower regions. Nevertheless, the correspondent and his boyfriend climbed on Citi Bikes and hied themselves to an enclosure in front of the Lower East Side Chinese restaurant Fat Choy. When their server goggled at the outfit, the correspondent said, “I’m going for gay Jabba the Hut.” She said, “You’ve hit the nail on the head.” Moments later, she proffered food, saying, “For Jabba and his friend.” Warmth. ♦
