The Outfit-Altering Alchemy of Draping a Sweater Over Your Shoulders
On insouciance, fashion as prop, and hack culture.
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Fashion likes to think of itself as a kingdom governed not by logic and order, but passion and instinct. It is a world unto itself, not beholden to such mundane things as protocol and convention. Despite this, some inalienable truisms do, in fact, exist. Take, for example, the simple reality that every outfit looks better with a sweater draped around the shoulders.
Think about it, dear reader: a T-shirt and jeans—well, those are just clothes on a body. But a T-shirt and jeans with a sweater draped over the shoulder … now, baby, that’s an OUTFIT.
“It’s a really easy way to add a bit of … something,” says Brandon Tan, the stylist and fashion director at Cosmopolitan and Seventeen magazines. He remembers first adopting the look himself when he transitioned from freelance styling to a staff position at GQ and thus had to start going into an office every day. “I’d be rushing out the door, and I would look at myself in the mirror and tilt my head and think, ‘I need, maybe, a little something else—another pattern, another texture. And then I would look to my pile of sweaters and just sling something on and run out the door.”
We live in a hack culture, and isn’t a sweater cavalierly tossed around your neck the ultimate shortcut in easy outfit-making? Indeed, a sweater draped lovingly around the delts is a so-simple-it’s-silly opportunity to add a pop of color or a contrasting fabric to an otherwise unremarkable outfit. It instantly gives your look dimension, dynamism, finesse, verve, and even a bit of a backstory.
“I remember that Auralee show from a few seasons back,” says stylist Ian Bradley. “And everyone was like, ‘Oh, this person’s character is so thought out,’ because there were all these unzipped sweaters, or sweaters around the shoulders.” A sweater tossed over the shoulders “adds a narrative,” he says. It’s an on-the-go act of someone in the midst of living their life. “Its functionality meets intention.”
The reason, Bradley says, that the simple addition of a sweater around the shoulders looks so right is because it introduces a certain tension into an outfit—between intentionality and insouciance, calculation and nonchalance. A boring business casual button-up and khakis? Just add a sweater! A crewneck sweater and jeans got you down? Just add a sweater! “If I’m wearing a suit and feel like a square,” Bradley says, “I’ll put a fuchsia sweater around my neck.” Tan, on the other hand, likes to add one to a wackier outfit, offsetting the eccentricity with a hint of WASPy formality. There’s no sartorial conundrum a sweater, swaddled lovingly around your shoulders, can’t fix.
I started thinking about this story a few weeks ago, but now the spring 2026 collections are in full swing and have proven that we are, in fact, reaching Peak SoS™ (sweater-over-shoulder). At Bottega Veneta, they were hung loosely around tailored torsos or, with one particularly chunky knit, pulled charmingly askew. At Tom Ford, Haider Ackermann sent out creamy cableknits dangling asymetrically over his models’ clavicles or cheekily paired with filmy, transparent gym shorts that revealed the underwear beneath (to be fair, that would get chilly!). At their first outing for Loewe, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez gave us the final boss form of SoS styling: a tied sweater worn as a top in and of itself.
Earlier this year, at the debuts for Jonathan Anderson’s Dior menswear and Michael Rider’s Celine, sweaters, too, were tossed over shoulders. “We’re in this neo-prep moment,” notes Bradley, who also recalls this being a styling hallmark of the Jenna Lyons days of J.Crew, and says it feels like a stylistic successor to the days when editors and influencers would affectedly wear their jackets over their shoulders. “It’s a mainstay of the fashion girlies,” he says of SoS. “And now it’s matriculated up to the runway.”
I actually find that a sweater draped over one’s shoulders isn’t at its most potent when deployed as some catwalk styling trick, but as a no-brainer flourish that anyone can execute in daily life. It is a bit of poetry to offset the humdrum prose of routine existence. It is, at its heart, a pragmatic choice—it might get cold, I should bring a sweater!— and possesses a certain practicality that can ground an outfit (after all, you can’t shimmy into a scarf when the temperatures dip). And yet it also transmits a variety of moods and flavors, ranging from quirky eccentricity to a slightly patrician formality, an affect that adds a sheen of propriety to an otherwise sloppy look. I rarely see it look “off” when I see it on the streets of New York, which I do many times a day, and it easily transcends the gender divide (how au courant). It’s versatile, it’s universal, it’s a panacea for the world’s ills.
“I’m pretty non-committal,” Tan says, “so having a sweater gives me agency as the day goes on. “I’m the type of person who dresses for the entire day, so having a sweater keeps me nimble.” (Tan admitted to justifying a sweater purchase solely based on the fact that it would make for a “good shoulder-sweater.”) He likes the “outfit agency” a sweater can provide—worn over the shoulders, around the waist, over a jacket or coat, under the armpit, crossbody style, or even worn as, you know, an actual sweater. And on and on. It’s fashion as prop, an ever-evolving object that can move and change with you throughout the day as you, yourself, evolve.
“There are definitely fashion victim-y ways to wear it,” says Bradley (think: a brash, multicolored sweater tied around a statement coat—too much!). “But it’s also a mainstay sort of thing.” He mentions that Diana Vreeland, the famously theatrical Vogue editor, would often wear a monochromatic look in gray or black, accented by a colorful sweater tied around the waist. “A navy sweater or T-shirt with a sweater draped over it, people are going to be doing that forever.”
Dear reader, we are at the precipice of a new season, a time when a day’s temperature bobs and weaves like a seasoned boxer in the ring. Thus, we, too, must stay agile and flexible to meet its capricious atmospheric demands. How does one embrace the moment—the warm days and cool nights, the casual afternoons followed by impromptu drinks at a buzzy bar, the sudden run-in with an old flame where you suddenly feel your outfit is just a tad lackluster? How do we rise to the occasion of life in all its messy, marvelous unpredictability? Well, I have a suggestion. Just toss a sweater over your shoulders.
This is the move, unlike the affected and impractical jacket over shoulder (how do you function without raising your arms?). People look at me askance when I wear a sweater over my shoulder year round in LA but IDGAF. Interior spaces are almost always overly air conditioned here, and I’ll be the one not freezing while in line at the bank teller, wheeling a cart around Whole Foods, or sipping champagne at Saint Laurent.
I was thinking about this the other day and even though I'm not a hater of trends (and comebacks), I think people use it as a shortcut to look or feel chic.