Engineered Garments Cagoule Dress

A cagoule is a hooded pullover. The word came into English from French, where it named a monk's hooded cloak, and settled on a light hooded layer pulled on against weather. So the name on this dress is doing work rather than decorating: the hood is the point of it.

A hood on a dress is a less obvious idea than it sounds, because the two halves come from opposite places. A hood belongs to outerwear, where it is shelter. A dress asks nothing of the back of the neck at all. Cutting the pair in seersucker settles which way the garment leans. Seersucker is made on the loom by holding two sets of warp threads at different tensions, so the slack set buckles into permanent puckered bands and the taut set stays flat, which holds most of the cloth off the skin and lets air move between. A hood on something that light is not shelter from cold. It is shade, and something to put up when the weather turns.

We wanted a summer dress that does something rather than one that is merely light, and a hood is the least likely useful thing to find on one.

Engineered Garments draws its women's pieces from the same vocabulary as the rest of its work, and a hood on a seersucker dress is that habit at its plainest.

One hundred percent cotton seersucker, made in the USA. Hooded. Colour: Natural and navy.

On a dress the length does most of the fitting, and the hood is the other thing to allow for: it carries weight and volume behind the neck, so the shoulder line sits differently from a collarless dress and the back of the garment holds a little more cloth. Seersucker has a small natural give from the pucker, moves easily, and will read rumpled within an hour of being put on, which is the cloth working rather than the dress failing.

Alone, hood down, which is how it will spend most of its life. Hood up in real sun, which is what the hood is for. Over the Square Neck Shirt in navy and white, where the navy runs through both.

Wash cool and hang to dry. Do not press the pucker flat: it is the structure of the cloth and it does not come back. Hang it by the shoulders rather than folding it over a rail, because a wet hood holds water long after the rest of the dress has given it up. Our cotton care guidance covers the rest.

The Andover Jacket in beige seersucker is the same cloth cut as a jacket, and the Folk Jacket is the squarer model in it. The Square Neck Shirt goes underneath. The Banded Collar Dress in olive plaid buttons down the front and ties at the waist. There is more on the house on the Engineered Garments designer page. Everything we carry from Engineered Garments is listed together.