It’s one of those fashion trends that start out looking absolutely ridiculous and then after a while seem perfectly reasonable.
The ‘blanket’ scarf is now an autumn/winter essential that will see you cosily through from Bonfire Night to Hogmanay and everything in between.
Essentially it’s just an oversized scarf that can be worn in a variety of ways but the term ‘blanket’ to describe it is thought to stem from an episode of The Tonight Show in 2018 when US presenter Jimmy Fallon interviewed Lenny Kravitz.
Some years earlier the singer-songwriter, who lives in the Bahamas, had been photographed wearing a massive, brown, chunky-knit scarf to go grocery shopping in New York and had been teased about it ever since.
Explaining the fashion choice, Kravitz said he wasn’t used to the cold and added: “I put on a little scarf to protect my throat, and that’s the scarf I had.”
Jimmy Fallon replied: “Lenny, this isn’t a scarf. This is a blanket.”
It wasn’t just the size of the so-called scarf, it was the knit that made it seem particularly gigantic and for the next few seasons, blanket scarves were thick and bulky, making them rather difficult to wear.
The choices were either to drape them around the shoulders, the way you might wear an actual blanket if, say, you were sitting around a campfire or to try wrapping it around your neck at the risk of disappearing inside it like a scoop of ice-cream slowly sinking down into a cone.
This season blanket scarves are finer and lighter but the large scale remains, making them eminently more wearable.
Among the ways to wear are: Poncho-style (belted at the waist); bandana-style (tied at the back and draped at the front); shrug-style (draped over the shoulders and tucked back under the elbows) as well as looped or pulled through as you might wear any other scarf.
And one of the benefits of not being famous is that for most of us, no matter how we decide to wear our blanket scarf, we won’t have to go on a chat show to defend ourselves.
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