We are deep into the “fall feels” as October rolls toward Halloween, the caramel and candle time of year.
Perhaps you are one of the millions of Americans who own a Cozee, “the world’s softest wearable blanket,” or one from the Comfy company, trademarked as “the Original”? They are the ultimate embodiment of the trend toward coziness over the last 30 or 40 years. These gigantically bulky garments are made of microfleece or “polar fleece” and lined with faux shearling, the stuff they call “sherpa” or “teddy bear”; with the hood up, they envelope your body all the way down to the back of your calves and transform you into a talking marshmallow. (A snacking marshmallow. A human marshmallow that lies about sipping expensive warm, cinnamon-spiced beverages from a cup with a built-in spout.) The Cozee brand offers wearable blankets in all sorts of cuddly patterns, from Snoopy enjoying pizza to corgi dogs or penguins in woolly red hats. Comfy brand, being the Original and therefore a tad more refined and classy, only gets as jazzy as plain grape-purple or a buffalo plaid.
I can’t say I’d go so far as to wear a Comfy or Cozee myself. I have my dignity, and, fashion-wise, they are an atrocity. But, with parenthood, I have become pro cozy. It was adorable and also, I think, positive for my children’s general well-being when I was raising them to engage in coziness parenting, taking care that my two imps always had footie pajamas, a fuzzy bathrobe (patterned with Rainbow Dash from “My Little Pony” or snowflakes), cushioned slipper socks from Hanna Andersson, a vintage quilt in 1930s pastels, and a space heater. I’m glad cozy has become the norm. For the children.
I’m a reformed stoic, myself. No one was making sure we had soft slippers in my distant childhood in the 1970s. We went around the house barefoot, even in January, even when you could see your breath in puffs when you awoke on a snowy day in a cold bedroom and stepped out from under the covers onto the rugless floor. A flannel nightie from Lanz of Austria passed for the utmost in indulgent warmth. My family atmosphere was like living within a Robert Frost poem: austere.
Austerity and hardiness certainly seemed like virtues 50 years ago. Cold? Put on a Fair Isle sweater, kid. We left the windows cracked open to let the fresh air in, even when the panes were spangled with frost.
America has become fanatically interested, sociologically speaking, in being comfortable and warm in the 21st century, swaddled in puffer-down robes and Memory Foam slippers. We light the pumpkin-spice tea candle and plug in the apple-scented diffuser, hang the fairy lights and settle into our beanbag furniture.
The reason I was expected to silently and stoically tolerate bare feet on bare floors at the age of 8 or 12 was because I was raised by people who were raised outside, hunting ducks in duck blinds and getting chapped knuckles rowing a skiff across the bay. You felt the seasons.
We have moved indoors — farther and farther indoors, from the kitchen to the couch to the bedroom where we engage in what the kids call “bed rotting” — over the last 50 years of human progress. The cozification of the people is more than just adjacent to the tech-enabled slothification of the people, it’s two sides of the same synthetic-knit throw blanket from T.J. Maxx. While I’m pro-cozy now, I’m against the eternal indoor life. I miss the outdoors.
I am not sure it’s necessary to get all psychological and attribute this trend to a mass cultural infantilization of a populace seeking shelter from a traumatizing present (although I certainly would have done so when I ghost-wrote fashion criticism at Vogue). Much of this cozification, I.M.H.O, can be attributed simply to the invention of synthetic materials as an alternative to cotton and wool. Spandex didn’t enter the retail stream until around 1980, incredibly, and there are entire generations born since then who don’t know what it feels like to wear pants with a waistband that cinches and binds as the Jordache and Levi’s jeans of yore did. Microfleece is, of course, an environmental menace, shedding microplastics wherever it goes. Perhaps the future lies not in plastics but in environmentally sustainable coziness. I’d get my broker right on it if I had a broker.