Everyone offers advice on how to wear a scarf (“Wrap it twice and let the ends hang”), but nobody tells you how. Ends hang where? Hang level with what? The internet is littered with advice-columns confidently declaring some rule of scarfyntax and then proceeding to omit the two pieces of information that actually determine whether the result works or not; how tall you are and how you plan to wear the coat you’re wearing it with. I somehow managed to get scarf season wrong in these completely unaddressed ways for about four years. Years!
That’s how fashion traumas go unnoticed; nobody tells you scarfing up wrong, they just internally note that you look like you stole your granddad’s curtains.
I finally figured mine out when I bought a scarf to wear with a coat and misjudged the length twice before getting it right, at which point I was kind of annoyed enough by scarf-gate to sit down and work out exactly what I was doing wrong.
Once I understood what those two contributing factors were, suddenly picking out a scarf stopped being guesswork and started feeling the same as buying any other damn thing; something you could take deliberate decisions about based on actual reasons. So here are those reasons; the two things you absolutely should consider before buying a scarf because “figure it out once you get home” is not advice, it’s someone giving you a scarf as a way of mocking you.
Height
Scarves come in a range of standard lengths, between 150cm and 200cm generally, but the packet doesn’t care that you’re 5’8″ while the man next to you is 6’3″, the packet treats anyone who buys that size as though they’re interchangeable. Spoiler alert: they’re not. I’m not giant, I’m 5’10” in wellies but my 190cm scarf that sits nicely on my friend Andrew looks like I’m trying to strangle myself with it. Ends that drag bottom on me when I drape it where they’re supposed to would be sitting midway up Andrew’s chest. That rule everyone repeats, that the dangling ends should sit between your waist and your thigh when you’re done wrapping it, only really helps if you know where yours would fall; and until you’ve stood there scarfing in front of a mirror, you can’t know that.
The difference is enough that I had to move down a size to get something that actually looked like it worked on me. Where I’d have defaulted to a 190cm before understanding how height affects things, I ended up choosing 170cm instead. The difference is subtle, until someone points it out. My flatmate Callum — who has never once criticised anything I’ve wear in the four years we’ve lived together — caught me getting ready to leave one day and complimented me on how it looked. Honestly, for Callum that’s
The coat
Same thing. Scarves have about four tying methods, onesies around, threesies into a knot, the Parisian whatever – like you’re going to actually stand there in the hallway tying bows out of your scarf every morning before work. In practice, you pick the style you like within a couple weeks of buying the scarf and then you’re set; so the question isn’t which way looks best, it’s which way are you actually going to use when Tuesday comes and you’re five minutes late. I wear mine with a single wrap through itself, the basic loop and pull; if it takes more than that I probably won’t bother on a day when I actually need to leave the house. And that single decision completely changes how long your scarf should be by at least 20cm either way.
If you wrap once, you can get away with a shorter scarf; doubling obviously uses more length.
I only just avoided buying a scarf that looked perfect until I saw I had to double it to get the style I wanted, and then realised that meant the ends only just came down to my waist.
A double wrap on my body meant it didn’t cover enough of my neck at all, and looking at that made me realise that the scarf I bought would either need to be significantly longer or tied a different way to work how I needed it to. Everybody ties their scarf differently; think about how you will before you buy it.
The other thing nobody talks about is what you plan to do with it. Not how you’ll tie it, what the scarf is actually for. Because if that scarf is doing real work – filling a legitimate gap in your outfit on your commute where you’ll actually be stuck standing outside of trains for 15 minutes – then it needs more length, it needs more bulk than a scarf that’s just there because your coat looks stupid with nothing hanging around your neck. I have one thin merino scarf that I know is purely decorative. It goes under my coat collar for about five seconds of(actual) effect before being tucked away for the rest of the day. Where that one can be thin, can be short because it never actually needs to wrap twice and cover my neck in February, my thicker woolie buffalo-check number is there to do the job. It keeps me warm, and as a result it had better be long enough to wrap twice and still cover my neck, or else I am committed 8:40am.
