Sixteen is an awkward number to shop. It’s too many to hold in your head and too few for the page to bother giving you filters, so you scroll the sudaderas rail — sudadera is just the Spanish word for a sweatshirt or hood — twice and land back on the first one you liked. Count the hoods on that rail at Fake Gods and there are sixteen of them. Three questions, asked in the order below, knock that down to two or three you’re genuinely choosing between.
Ask these in order and the rail shrinks
Order matters here, honestly more than the questions themselves do. Answer the first one, and you’ve either knocked out fourteen garments or two, and it’s worth knowing which before you’ve spent ten minutes on prints.
- Does it open at the front, or do you pull it over your head?
- Full length through the body, or cropped?
- Which color are you actually going to wear, as opposed to admire?
None of the three is about money, and that’s on purpose. Prices on this rail bunch up so tightly in the middle that sorting low to high leaves you staring at nine garments within a couple of euros of each other, which settles nothing.
Does it open at the front?
Two of the sixteen do. Both carry con cremallera in the name — a zip — and both sit at €96.30, the top of the rail. So a front opening settles your price before you start, and you’re picking between a black FG zip and a navy Gods FC. The listing calls that navy one a suéter de punto, knitted rather than looped fleece, so it lives in a different drawer than the rest of the page.
The other fourteen go over your head. That’s most of the rail, and if you’re happy pulling things on you’ve already cleared the two dearest garments off your list without looking at a single photograph.
What a zip changes once you own it
Mostly it changes the middle of the day. A Madrid January morning sits near 8 °C and the same afternoon can feel like spring, and a zip you can drop halfway is how you stay dressed through both. A pullover handles that less gracefully — it’s either on or it’s off, and taking it off in a crowded bus means dragging it over your face. A closed front keeps your middle warmer, though. Neither one wins. They’re just different garments sharing a page.
Full length, or cropped?
Only two hoods on the rail run short, both labeled corta: the heather gray Godsbrand and the Blue Circle, which is also gray. And that’s the quiet consequence of such a small catalogue — if you want a cropped hood here, you’re choosing gray. There isn’t a cropped black one to want.
The two cropped cuts are about €27 apart, incidentally, so body length isn’t what the money is tracking either. Shape and price run on separate tracks all the way along this rail.
If cropped is new to you
Look at what it’ll sit on top of first, not at the hood. A cropped body finishes somewhere around the waistband, so whatever’s underneath is on show now (that’s rather the point of it). High-waisted jeans work with that. Low-rise ones leave a gap you’ll keep tugging at. Full length covers the lot and asks you nothing, which is why fourteen of sixteen take that shape.
Which color will you really wear?
Here’s where the rail sorts itself out, because the colors fall unevenly, and the thumbnails don’t show you that until you count them.
| Color | Hoods | Which ones |
| Black | 4 | Sports Club, Red Dice, Billiard, and the FG zip |
| Gray | 4 | Both cropped cuts, A New Star in dark gray, Love Script in light |
| Navy and blue | 3 | Washed Star navy, the Gods FC zip, Love Script in blue |
| Washed yellow and green | 2 | The two remaining Star hoods |
| Pink | 1 | The San Valentín hood |
| Cream | 1 | Coupe Des Alpes |
| Unstated | 1 | Gods Athleisure — the listing names none |
Half the rail is black or gray. That sounds dull written down, and in a Spanish winter it’s simply what people wear on the metro, so the shop stocking it eight times over isn’t a failure of imagination. The interesting end is the thin end — four garments carry a color nobody else on the page carries, and three of those four are the washed Star hoods in navy, green and yellow.
When you already own one in that color
Then cross it off, all of it. Own a black hood already? A quarter of the page disappears, and it takes with it the four you’d have spent longest comparing, since black graphic hoods photograph almost identically. Same with gray. Do this before you read a single product description, and you’ll usually be down to five or six hoods.
What it looks like when you run it
Take a pullover, full length, in gray. Run those three answers through the rail and exactly two hoods survive: A New Star in dark gray and Love Script in light gray. Two. The decision is now whether you prefer a dark gray or a pale one, and the pale one happens to cost about €23 less, which is the first moment in the whole process where price has anything useful to say.
Try another. A zip, in navy — that’s the Gods FC, one garment, no choice to make, done. Or a full-length pullover in a color nobody else on the page carries, and you’re looking at the three washed Star hoods plus the cream Coupe Des Alpes. Four options, none of them mistakable for another.
Sixteen of fifty-two
Fifty-two pieces in the shop altogether, which makes this one rail nearly a third of it. Nothing else comes close — there are twelve tees, six pairs of shorts, six trousers, five puffers, four sweatshirts and four knits. Hoods are where the weight of the catalogue sits, and for a Spanish year that’s a sensible place to put it, since a hood covers October through April while a puffer earns its keep for maybe a couple of weeks.
Fabric won’t help you split them up either. The Athleisure listing talks about soft cotton and a relaxed cut, and pretty much every other description on the rail says something similar, so there’s no lever there to pull. Cut, opening, color. Those are the only three things that actually differ, which is why they’re the three questions.
Answer them in that order before you open a single product page. Sixteen hoods stop being a scroll and turn into a short list you can settle in an evening, and if you change your mind about the color halfway through, the rail is small enough that starting over costs you about two minutes.
