This Thanksgiving, Look Cute While Making a Statement in One of These Sight Unseen–Approved Aprons

Well, what do you know? Turns out all I needed to have fun on the internet again was to go shopping for aprons. What a strange pocket of online shopping — and historical discourse — aprons inhabit! They’re somehow everywhere you’d least expect them to be (did you know Gen Z fashion fave Tyler McGillivary used to make one?) and not at all in the places you’d think to look. (I’m truly shocked there’s not a Bode or a Thank You Have a Good Day apron out there pieced from antique kitchen linens.) In my research, I found a cream-colored, double-stitched linen set from Brunello Cucinelli, for when you don’t want to stain your $1,800 cable-knit sweater but you don’t mind getting a little schmutz on the $750 garment you bought to protect it. I discovered that, once upon a time, Fondazione Achille Castiglioni made their own version. I found one by Sandy Liang embroidered with the phrase “i am going to be my own kind of princess,” and I honestly couldn’t tell if that was a serious sentiment or a comment on the act of feminist reclamation wearing an apron can sometimes entail. I read a Vogue article that recommended you roast a chicken in full leathers.

The 37 examples I landed upon aren’t quite so wild as that (nor, despite their potentially peekaboo nature, do they even begin to approximate the naughtiness of this Duchamp; labeled an apron, it’s actually a potholder, but who’s counting). And I came away from this exercise understanding that the apron-buying public is vastly underserved; so much beige linen, not enough fun! Why isn’t every cool restaurant across America selling aprons as merch? Regardless, the 37 aprons below are extremely solid, fashionable, sometimes surreal choices for when you’re basting a turkey, glass of wine in hand, two weeks from today. Please enjoy and DM us any favorites we might have missed!

Top: Vintage photo from the 1964 opening on Habitat in London