It was knit from gray lamb’s wool. It defined a gray area. On a stark set, amid the playback of a plaintive address to an ex, the hip-hop star Drake danced to the beat of his own drum machine in the video for ‘‘Hotline Bling’’ while bundled in a roomy sweater with a collar that rose to touch his resolute jaw. Designers have often praised the turtleneck for the way that it moves with the body, and that was its job here, to envelop and underline Drake’s dancing — dancing that was objectively uncool, a choreography of private pleasure.

‘‘Hotline Bling’’ is a song about placing booty calls, and this turtleneck, with its forgiving dad-wear cut, seemed an invocation of an afghan that lovers might have snuggled under. Yet a fan wouldn’t have wanted it to be any more body-hugging, which would have given Drake’s jerks, knee bends and swivels the unfortunate effect of Mike Myers’s turtlenecked character, Dieter, in the old ‘‘Sprockets’’ sketch. Instead, Drake was giving the public a performance of masculinity that it hadn’t known it wanted.

One evening in London in 1924, when the playwright Noël Coward was recently famous, he opened his newspaper to learn that he had originated a fashion for colorful high-necked sweaters. The turtleneck, which had long been humbly insulating longshoremen and sea dogs against the salty air, suddenly achieved symbolic value. In his memoir ‘‘Present Indicative,’’ Coward claims that he turned to turtlenecks ‘‘more for comfort than for effect,’’ blithely sliding past the fact that the simple show of privileging comfort invariably creates its own effect. He noticed ‘‘more and more of our seedier West End chorus boys’’ slithering into these sweaters over the months that followed, and he seemed pleased to have had a hand in investing the turtleneck with new social standing.

There was a current of exoticism to it and more than a whiff of moral laxity, sharing a certain flamboyant ease with a more famous, less versatile sartorial statement of Coward’s — the dressing gown. Loitering around Oxford that November, Evelyn Waugh marveled at the popularity of the new high-necked sweater on the party scene, judging it ‘‘most convenient for lechery because it dispenses with all unromantic gadgets like studs and ties.’’ Further, the garment offered cosmetic benefits: ‘‘It also hides the boils with which most of the young men seem to have encrusted their necks.’’ That these two aspects of the turtleneck — easy access, convenient concealment — are mutually useful has forever since been appreciated by teenagers whose dates have been so rash as to raise hickeys.