Perhaps the broad adoption of the hoodie was inevitable. The coronavirus epidemic has, after all, been a catalyst for things that were already happening (the shift from high-street retail to e-commerce, for instance, and the large-scale adoption of remote working). The transition into ever-comfier clothes seems obvious. At this point in the year, if you are still waking up every day and donning a suit, tie and a pair of polished Derbies to go and sit at your kitchen table for eight hours, you either work for a company with a worryingly fastidious Zoom dress code, or you need to have a serious think about getting treatment for your addiction to LinkedIn.

Last week, a tipping point of sorts: the UK chancellor Mr Rishi Sunak (for the uninitiated: invented the furlough scheme, has a wife who reportedly has a larger money bin than the Queen, and is somewhat disturbingly referred to as “Dishy Rishi” by mums online) posed for press pictures for the Treasury, signing papers at his desk ahead of the following day’s spending review. The headlines the next day focused squarely on the grey cotton hoodie, white shirt and striped tie he decided to wear. “Did Rishi Sunak just kill the hoodie?” The Independent wailed. The Evening Standard called him an “unlikely style icon”, while someone on Twitter said the hoodie-shirt-tie combination gave Mr Sunak a “strong deputy head boy doing politics homework in the sixth form centre vibe”.

It was a strange, incongruent choice to be sure – a bit like wearing cufflinks to bed – but in many ways it rang in a new age. A hoodie on a politician throws up all kinds of difficult questions about decorum and formality, not to mention whether society has resigned itself to clothes usually worn while eating biscuits on the sofa and staring into space.

Have we finally given up? Are hoodies the future? Is the chancellor trying to pretend he’s “relatable”? The answer to all of those points is that it certainly seems so.

The New York Times reported in August that Entireworld, the brand of candy-coloured sweats founded by Band of Outsiders’ Mr Scott Stenberg, has enjoyed months of record-breaking sales. Our collective trauma has manifested, and it’s wearing a hooded sweatshirt.

It’s not just in Downing Street, either. In a more traditional arena, professional golfer Mr Tyrrell Hatton caused a stir in October after wearing an adidas hoodie – not regarded as appropriate attire for the course, apparently – to win a big tournament at Wentworth, sending golf Twitter into a frenzied debate about snobbery and gatekeeping in the sport. The Golf Channel reports that the furore – “Hoodygate”, as it came to be known – even inspired one English club to send a note to its members to say that hoodies were similar to “designer ripped jeans” and were therefore prohibited. Eventually – and we say this from experience – such traditions will fall, and the hoodie will also envelop golf clubs in its fleece-lined, amorphous embrace. Fighting the inevitable just makes you look old.

Celebrities, of course, have long adopted the hoodie as the default wardrobe item. Look at any famous man off-duty and if he’s not wearing one, that’s because he probably died in 2005. When Mr Timothée Chalamet isn’t on the red carpet in, say, a Haider Ackermann suit, he’s skulking around somewhere in an oversized hoodie (we hear he has a penchant for CELINE HOMME). Mr Justin Bieber’s own baggy hoodie collection knows no bounds – indeed, it’s pretty much all the singer seems to wear, whether it’s a pink one that he matched to his hair in the “Yummy” music video at the turn of 2020, or the cream one he donned while out with his wife Hailey in Beverly Hills last week.

At some point, we’ll have to ask ourselves if the sartorial representation of a teenager is what we actually want to wear to every occasion. But right now, we can only ask if the hoodie is truly fulfilling what we need from our clothes. And the answer unequivocally has to be yes.