Photo by Noah Washington/The Atlanta Voice
This week, the Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA) is showcasing the good, the bad, and the beautiful of one of the most recognizable and misunderstood garments in modern culture. The Hoodie: Identity. Power. Protest. opening Thursday, Oct. 30, explores how a simple sweatshirt has come to embody questions of power, perception, and social identity across generations and geographies.
The hoodie is an item found in nearly every closet, yet it carries vastly different meanings depending on who wears it and where.
“What does it mean to wear a hoodie? Who am I when I wear a hoodie? Who is anybody else when they wear a hoodie?” asked MODA Executive Director and Co-Curator Laura Flusche, Ph.D. “And who gets to decide what a hoodie means at any given moment?”
Originally presented in 2019 at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, The Hoodie has been re-curated for Atlanta by Flusche and Dr. Regina N. Bradley, associate professor of English and African Diaspora Studies at Kennesaw State University.
“We saw that the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam had put up an exhibition called The Hoodie,” Flusche explained. “We thought it was incredibly interesting, incredibly applicable to Atlanta. They invited us to take the theme and re-curate it to reflect what’s happening in Atlanta and the Southeast.”
The Atlanta edition grounds the global story of the hoodie in Southern culture, connecting fashion, hip-hop, and protest.
“We were trying to figure out how to situate the South in the conversation about the hoodie,” said Bradley. “My areas of research are Southern hip-hop, so I was like, well, Southern hip-hop, duh. That gave me a deep dive into which artists really use the hoodie to symbolize something unique, something special.”
Inside the galleries, visitors will find more than 50 hoodies displayed as both design objects and cultural artifacts. International brands such as Off-White by Virgil Abloh, Nike, Supreme, and GAP appear alongside Atlanta-based designers, including Atlanta Influences Everything, Brain Love, Kultured Misfits, Eastside Golf, and Grady Baby Company.
Flusche said the local selection was intentional: “We started looking at what the streetwear brands in Atlanta are doing, who’s reclaiming some piece of Atlanta culture and using the hoodie as a vehicle for doing that,” she said. “That’s what informed how we reached out and figured out who we wanted.”
For co-curator Bradley, one of the highlights was celebrating Atlanta’s homegrown creativity. “We wanted to make sure that we highlighted at least some of the incredible creatives and entrepreneurs in Atlanta,” she said. “We went down a rabbit hole, asking, who’s creating in Atlanta? Who has hoodies we can use for the exhibit?”
Bradley also designed the Southern Hip-Hop and Superhero walls, where cultural icons like T.I., Jeezy, and Kriss Kross share space with comic-book figures such as Spider-Man, Luke Cage, and Angela Abar from Watchmen. “I’m just a comic book nerd,” she laughed. “We wanted to get the most iconic ones we could find, especially in recent memory, and represent them here.”
Exhibition designer Susan Sanders led the exhibition’s layout and visual presentation, while graphic designer Hannah Shannon said bringing The Hoodie to life was one of her favorite projects with MODA. With nearly a decade of experience in exhibition and graphic design, Shannon crafted the show’s panels, posters, and large-scale window graphics to match the curatorial vision. “All I had seen were the panels and the text,” she said. “So walking in and seeing everything installed, the objects, the colors, the scale, it looked even better than I imagined.”
For Bem Joiner, co-founder of Atlanta Influences Everything, one of the featured brands, the exhibit marks a milestone for the city’s creative identity. “The fact that our hoodie would make it into a museum based on design, that’s a statement,” he said. “This started from a rant about Atlanta not being respected, and years later, it’s resonating large enough that MODA would say, ‘We want to place it on the wall.’ It feels good to be seen.”
Joiner said the moment is bigger than fashion, it’s about connection. “We believe that Atlanta, the letters ATL, have agency,” he said. “Atlanta Influences Everything is the ideology of that agency. We’re hoping that folks come and not only see our stuff but also other local brands, too. It’s amazing that a museum brought us all together.”
For Bradley, seeing that connection come to life has been deeply meaningful. “I just wanted to do something different and unique,” she said. “Kind of stretches my abilities and what I have and haven’t done, and this is the result. I’m just so very pleased with how it came out.”