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Many Indians have scarring childhood memories of being forced, at the slightest drop in temperature, to wear the dreaded “monkey” cap. Come winter and school assemblies would be a sea of these woollen horrors, which seemed like they were deliberately made of the roughest yarn. But worse than being uncomfortable, the monkey cap — or the balaclava cap, to call it by its proper name — was uncool in a way few items of clothing are: The hippest kids were always bareheaded (a cold in the head, in one’s early youth, was preferable to the indignity of the monkey cap) or, at the most, wore a beanie. To find the losers in a classroom, all one had to do was look around for woebegone faces peeking out from within the scratchy depths of a monkey cap.
But as times change, so does fashion. What was once a universally recognised symbol of nerdiness has, suddenly, inexplicably, become cool enough that two cricketers wore it on the field during a recent Ranji Trophy match in Delhi. To be sure, with the minimum temperature dropping to 5.6 degrees Celsius, the Capital was officially colder than Dehradun, Dharamshala and Nainital. Through the dense fog that descended on the pitch, could be spotted Tamil Nadu seamer L Vignesh and allrounder Washington Sundar, going about their business in monkey caps.
In doing so, the two cricketers may have just revealed the secret of fashionably wearing unfashionable things: The nonchalance that comes with recognising that what one wears doesn’t always have to be a symbol of one what is. At the end, clothes are meant to serve an actual physical function. It is immaterial whether they look “cool” by frankly arbitrary standards (for example, “mom” jeans from the ’90s are now trendy again). As an insecure kid, one may have preferred a stuffed nose to looking nerdy. Part of growing up is understanding that staying warm is the cooler choice.
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