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Ugly Christmas sweaters: They’re gaudy, loud, and the chosen uniform of seasonal rom-com bachelors. Perhaps your dear great-aunt knitted one for you à la A Christmas Story, and although it’s not your style, it does have a certain je ne sais quoi that comes with the earnestness in production and then irony in wearing.
These knits have become synonymous with the holiday season. Often, party dress codes—the first of this kind may have been in Vancouver in 2002—encourage their tackiness and that guests compete to see who donned the most disastrous one.
Obtaining an ugly sweater used to mean digging around in thrift stores or the backs of closets to find sometimes handmade monstrosities embellished with all sorts of corny Christmas creatures. However, today revelers can purchase sweaters made en masse by retailers like uglychristmassweater.com. These modern sweaters can feature your favorite band, a dabbing Santa, or obscene holiday innuendo, or they may come with 3D plushie elements that ratchet up the tacky factor. It might even be a misnomer to call some of these sweaters; many are actually nothing more than a polyester sweatshirt with a stockinette stitch screenprinted on them in a sad imitation of what it could have been, had it actually come off of someone’s knitting needles.
A manufactured sweater that says “Naughty List: Your Mom” on it has more in common with the humor of a tween boy than it does with the original spirit of the tradition. The original “ugly” sweaters were fun because they were earnest and often made with love, even if that love took the form of an ill-fitting and garish garment. Now, Santa-themed bar crawls and office holiday parties are outfitted with holiday-themed sweaters and sweatshirts, bringing the same energy as someone loudly interrupting a conversation to tell a lewd joke. Perhaps to talk about the sweaters is to betray them and their spirit. As many learned at the 2019 Met Gala, if you try too hard it’s not camp anymore.
The commercialization of this once kitschy holiday tradition reveals one of the ever-growing issues of the fashion industry: Overproduction leads to overconsumption and a throwaway mindset for many consumers. A simple search for Christmas sweaters—even of the non-ironic variety—will flood your social feeds with ads for a seemingly endless carousel of sweaters in any theme you could imagine. “The internet has contributed to overproduction. And overproduction—since its inception, you can trace much of what we see today, in terms of content, going back to the rise of YouTube haulers more than a decade ago,” said Maeve Galvin, director of research and policy at Fashion Revolution, an advocacy and research organization. “Social media has accelerated this further, particularly marketing tactics and influencer culture and the gamification of consumption that it has driven,” she noted.
Galvin said that the rapidly growing demand fueled by quickening trend cycles has created even more incentive to manufacture these products at a loss. Even worse, it makes manufacturers “reliant on exploitatively low worker wages so they can remain cheap. It’s a business model where mass-selling is how profits are made, extracting heavily from people and planet,” she said. “These are not finite resources.”
Obviously, these seasonal sweaters are only a small piece in the pile of clothing waste. However, the tradition, which at one point seemed playful and fun, has turned into yet another way to promote overconsumption. “Unsustainable trends like this one contribute to the bigger picture where clothing waste has devastated communities, infiltrated our waterways, and affected human health,” Galvin said.
And when the season is over, these commercialized Christmas sweaters often meet the same fate as other fast-fashion discards: donation piles or thrift stores. But simply donating a cheap or niche item when it is no longer needed isn’t the best option. Nichole Sesti, owner of The Niche Shop, hand-picks all of her inventory for her Manhattan secondhand stores. She said that “it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to find quality-made vintage garments in thrift stores, including ugly Christmas sweaters.”
This may put a bit of a damper on holiday cheer, but there are still plenty of options. Sesti’s advice is to “first ask yourself if you actually like the trend, or are you just looking to jump on a bandwagon because everyone else is?” And Galvin offers a reminder: “There’s no need to buy new.”
So if you still want to don something delightfully tacky and festive this holiday season, you have options—break out the glue gun and pompoms, dig through your closet, or grab one from a thrift store before it gets to the landfill. In a way, you can have your fruitcake and eat it too.
