Decline of the Hat

Kane said:

I am at a downtown Santa Monica farmers market every week, and I do see a fair amount of hats. I don’t know how relevant Santa Monica is to a broader sense of style, but hats are not uncommon there. A lot of older people are out in Tilley type of hats (no doubt with an SPF rating) and a thick layer of white sun screen smeared over their faces and necks, but many people — young to old — are donning fedoras and the occasional western. My impression is that people there are becoming comfortable including a nice felt hat as part of their regular attire, and that the sense of a fedora being a poser’s costume or period piece is not there, that people are loosening up a bit about wearing a nice hat. It’s nice to see.
Btw, isn’t today, Jan. 15, national hat day? Like talk like a Pirate day? Hmmm.

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Yes, today is national hat day. Wear your best, proudly.

Kane said:

Btw, isn’t today, Jan. 15, national hat day? Like talk like a Pirate day? Hmmm.

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Ahrrrrrrr!

deadlyhandsome said:

A property adjusted headrest is a real safety device and no brimmed hats work in conjunction with them. I’m not about to compromise safety so I can wear my hat when driving. My sartorial preferences are secondary to self preservation. Anyway, a hat is functional and I personally don’t need that function when driving. Just me.


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Umm, I was only joking about getting rid of head rests, or head restraints or whatever they are properly called.

nvilletele said:

Umm, I was only joking about getting rid of head rests, or head restraints or whatever they are properly called.

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I thought as much.


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Cost and convenience. I wouldn’t pay $50 for a ball cap but have paid four times or more for fedoras. I’ve never left my favorite ball cap home on vacation because I was afraid I’d damage it on the flight. I never dedicated 1/4 or more of precious closet space for my collection of ball caps.

I grew up in the 60’s in rural, coastal South Carolina. No one I knew wore a fedora. I wasn’t taught the associated etiquette, except that due to television I knew that you tipped your fedora to a lady and removed a fedora indoors, especially a restaurant while dining. In my 20’s through mid 50’s I wore ball caps. Few people, including myself, apply the same etiquette to ball caps. I have very fine hair and I have to go through a “process” each morning before I can go out in public. A hat solves the problem so long as I don’t have to remove it in public. So, on a Saturday morning if I want to go eat breakfast without “fixing” my hair a ball cap that I can leave on while dining is just a lot more convenient than a fedora that I feel I must remove.

So why do I now choose to wear fedoras despite the inconvenience and cost? Because I like them; they are more age appropriate for me than a ball cap; I enjoy being just a bit different than the herd in ball caps; and I don’t spend any more on them than I can afford.

In 1953 we seem to have had a National Hat Week!! I also have other ads from this time with a reminder......
M

Here is a very interesting and thoughtfull article on our topic of hat decline.......
Pretty well done and well researched!
Reading the part about walking outside a lot made me think of the opening credits of the first couple of years of the "Bob Newhart Show", showing images of a hatted Dr. Hartly walking around Chicago to and from his office with the hat occasionally seen in the actual episode. Later in the series the walking around scenes are gone (they referance him having a car and a parking space at the office) and.....you guessed it......the hat disappears!
M
https://medium.com/s/pulling-at-thr...iene-killed-the-middle-class-hat-2f382b4a35ec

deadlyhandsome said:

I’ve heard that too and it rings true. It was a time of change and rebirth. The old ways were falling and the world experienced change at an unbelievable rate. The aristocracy was in free fall and the working class were really empowered for the first time in history. In the past, dress, including hats, was a way to distinguish societal rank and most people showed a level of deference to those in a higher class. The cracks were apparent after WW1, but after WW2 the dam had burst. Now look at how conspicuous consumption is looked down on and billionaires dress in hoodies and jeans and interact with us little people. Unfortunately, a lot of babies were thrown out with the bath water.

I tease my wife and blame it all on giving women the vote, she doesn’t laugh.


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I think it is simply because people don't spend any time out of doors any more. People who do almost always put something on their head, usually a cheap, adjustable baseball cap. Brimmed hats offer more protection from the elements but can be an inconvenience jumping in and out of vehicles, which is something even those of us who spend a lot of time outside do. For those who are only under the sky for the time it takes to travel between the vehicle and a building a head covering is unnecessary and inconvenient.

I go daily out onto the trails in the forest for a couple of hours no matter the weather. I do not usually leave the house in a vehicle so I wear a brimmed hat to keep the rain and snow out of my hearing aids and off my bifocals.

Orvil Newton said:

I think it is simply because people don't spend any time out of doors any more. People who do almost always put something on their head, usually a cheap, adjustable baseball cap. Brimmed hats offer more protection from the elements but can be an inconvenience jumping in and out of vehicles, which is something even those of us who spend a lot of time outside do. For those who are only under the sky for the time it takes to travel between the vehicle and a building a head covering is unnecessary and inconvenient.

I go daily out onto the trails in the forest for a couple of hours no matter the weather. I do not usually leave the house in a vehicle so I wear a brimmed hat to keep the rain and snow out of my hearing aids and off my bifocals.

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There is certainly some truth there. However, the wealthy businessman of decades past didn’t necessarily spend a lot of time outside but still wore brimmed hats. It was de rigueur that men wore hats and wear them they did.

The answers is obviously multifaceted with lots factors contributing to the decline.

I suppose there are also lots of reasons why we still wear them, some practical and some preferential.


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Actually even the wealthy businessmen of the past spent more time out doors than one would imagine. My grandfather did not take cabs everywhere and especially when downtown would walk a few blocks from his offices to the Board of Trade Building. Part of it was that even back then walking was considered good exercise and in very real terms people in general and especially city people were just used to walking everywhere (as they are even today really). I see more hats (and caps and whatever) when I visit cities and college towns than almost anywhere these days.

It should be noted that public transportation was nothing like today...the early buses and the street trains were not the climate controlled wonders they are today.

But, as that article shows and many have said here, there really were a multitude of factors all colliding together to reach the demise of general hat wear. Of the many factors I personally give the highest factors to the changes in acceptable public dress and the extreme of the casual wear EVERYWHERE including many business environments........dare I mention how even tellers (and bank officers) are wearing blue jeans nowadays......
just my 2 cents....
M
PS Dare I mention something even my wife commented on.....outside the city (where people still do walk a lot).....unless it it VERY cold....teenagers, twenty somethings and even many others are not wearing coats??? I suppose many of the same environmental factors...directly house to bus or car......from bus or car to school...or work....or Walmart or the ever declining Mall.............

Decline of the hat: Some people don't deserve a nice hat.

colleency said:

If this has been discussed before, I apologize. I searched but wasn't able to find anything.
It is my understanding that men and women in the U.S. stopped wearing hats every day in the 1950s. Does anyone know if this is correct?
Also, does anyone know to what the decline in hat wearing is attributed? I believe it to be both the popularity of the automobile, as well as a general rise in casualness in clothing.

The reason I point to the car is that the rise in auto travel was about the same time, and it's just not convenient to wear hats in cars, other than baseball caps. As the headrest went up and the roof went down, it just wasn't practical to wear brims or anything of height. Does anyone have any information on the decline of the hat?

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This pandemic and it's subsequent lockdown, has given me an opportunity to read about subject matters that, in normal times, I wouldn't give a second thought to, hat wearing being one of them.

Cast a glance over a photograph of a crowd or a street 100 or even 50 years ago. Take a look at the men assembled, and see if you can spot any of them who aren't wearing a hat. If you look at the history of menswear, in the last 100 years it's been a gradual progression from formal to casual wear. Up until the 1960s, most men would have no more left the house without a hat than they would without their trousers. Bankers and stockbrokers made the commute into work wearing bowler hats, gentlemen took to the streets in straw boaters and manual workers passed through the factory gates wearing cloth caps.

The crowd shots of sporting events like the FA Cup in the 1920s (soccer) show a sea of brims, peaks and ribbons. The type of hat men wore may have been dependent upon their station, but regardless of class, men did not venture out in public without a hat upon their head.

Come the 1960s, however, and the rigid adherence to a code of headgear seemed to fade. Men started going about their business without a hat. It was probably due to the motorcar. Before cars became common hats were a useful item of clothing to keep the weather off. There was a time when men felt naked without a hat. And it was a status symbol - you had the bowler hat and the flat cap. It showed your place in the hierarchy. In the post-war period, with the most intense class stratification starting to fade, it was perhaps understandable that the badges of status like bowler and flat cap no longer carried the same weight. Hats, up until then, had been big business. At their peak, hat factories around Manchester produced felt hats in their thousands - the Denton Hat Company was making 100,000 a week in the 1930's to satisfy demand.

Tim Boucher, the proprietor of hat outfitter Bates, in London's Jermyn Street, agrees that the hat watershed came in the 1960s. "The younger generation had longer hair and that stopped them wanting to wear hats as much," he says, adding, "people were also becoming more affluent, they were buying cars, they weren't needing to wear hats."

Peter Howarth, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph's men's fashion magazine, says the decline of formality in menswear has led to the disappearance of the hat. "There is this myth that John F Kennedy went to his inauguration in 1960 without a hat. Actually he did, but he didn't wear it during the ceremony."

Generally if you look at the history of menswear, in the last 100 years it's been a gradual progression from formal to casual wear. The jacket has gone from a military frock coat to the jacket of a lounge suit, the shirt has gone from something with stiff studded collars to a fold down collar, and the formal, handmade shoe has been replaced, in some cases, with trainers. Nowadays the expectation is that the things worn, will be comfortable. And the formal hat fell victim to that general trend.

So has the modern man turned his back on the fedora et al? Is hat wearing, other than a woolly one when the mercury plummets, merely an affectation? We shouldn't be too quick to pronounce the death of the hat. In recent years, before the pandemic, UK hat sales had risen by about 30%, A lot of younger hat wearers are tending to go in for things like the narrow-band trilby, or the popular, Gatsby cap. It is now not uncommon to see men on nights out wearing hats, rather than cloth caps, perhaps inspired by celebrity hat wearers, who knows? Maybe a lot of younger, casually-dressed customers are seeking ways to show their individuality.

Hat-wearing for men is often linked to formal behaviour - the tipping of a hat when a lady walks past, the removal of a hat on entry to church, the holding of a hat to the heart during the national anthem, and the throwing aloft at weddings or some such celebration. Has hat wearing started a come back, it will be interesting to watch developments.