Just last week I saw a snappy young gentleman wearing a fedora, and stopped in my tracks to admire him. I have noticed a small trend in New York of young black men wearing bowlers–looks great!
As a Woman of a Certain Age, I find myself hoping that both corsets and face veils make a reappearance.
I just bought myself a new fedora. I’d been wanting a good hat for a long time, and it was hard to find one that looked good on me.
I got the Indiana Jones style (for lack of the proper name) but would love to get a more classic looking grey fedora also.
Just add water, it makes it’s own sauce!
It really was Kennedy. I’m old enough to remember it, and it definitely happened with a bang, right at his inauguration. And at the time, people were saying that this was the reason.
The same thing happened once before; when a movie (“It Happened One Night”) showed Clark Gable without an undershirt, men all across America stopped wearing undershirts.
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
funeefarmer
Well, I don’t think that’s what she was referring to, and I don’t think that is a general rule. You take off your hat going into churches and homes and someone’s office, not when going into a building. Or else the photos of the 40s that I have seen have a lot of non-polite people in them.
My sister’s theory is that the automobile is responsible for the disappearance of hats. Her contention is people would remove their hats when entering a car, rather than risk crushing them, and soon found it was easier to do without hats entirely.
Flora said, “…I find myself hoping that both corsets and face veils make a reappearance.”
Flora, are you nuts? I thank my lucky stars that I was born in an era of comfortable clothes! And I thank our flapper and suffragette great-grandmothers who made it all possible. Go back to girdles? Not on your tintype!
I think hats are awesome, to pluck a more juvenile phrase than I might use normally. 
This is true of men and women. One attorney I used to work with in California had caps and hats that he would just roll up and stick in a coat pocket, then wear outside. He looked ever-so-much better with them!
As one who has been wearing hats for upward of fifteen years (mostly berets, although I have a couple of fedoras, and I used to have a favorite porkpie), I agree with Johnny Angel and am in no hurry to see them come back in style. After all, my beret is what makes me unique, and I already went through hell with La Monica. I’m in no hurry to try and explain to groups of college students that I have been ahead of the fashion curve since they were toddlers.
And while I generally despise colder weather, it does give me the opportunity to wear my hat. So bring on the cold!
Waste
Flick Lives!
Of course, if certain things came into style, it would be a lot easier for me to dress the way I wanted. I can’t buy clothes retail except in places that specialize in somewhat more flamboyant tastes. Even those places don’t quite have what I need, because it seems that your contemporary popinjay is overly fond of double-breasted suits or colarless jackets. I prefer single-breasted or even three-button sharkskin jackets.
“I have noticed a small trend in New York of young black men wearing bowlers–looks great!”
I have seen this occasionally here in Chicago, but only in the cold-weather months. You invariably see a derby worn with a long black wool topcoat over a dark suit with one of those three-button jackets with small lapels that are starting to make a comeback.
The cold-weather thing leads into why I think bowlers are unlikely to come back. Black is the only proper color for a bowler. Therefore, they must be worn with a black or very dark suit, and if one wears a topcoat, only a dark wool coat will do. If you doubt me, picture a derby over a regular tan trenchcoat, or even a black trenchcoat. To say the least, it doesn’t work. And even though large people wore bowlers when they were popular, the only people you see wearing them now are tall and thin, as I said above.
Mind you, while derbies are very rare, I see a lot more fedoras now than I did even just five years ago. In the summer, I see a fair number of men wearing panama hats with their suits. And a few times this most recent summer, I even saw a man wearing a boater – a real straw boater, not one of those styrofoam imitations that are handed out at political rallies.
I see a lot of canvas hats, and those sailor hats. I rarely see fedoras, though. I suppose I should just be happy that people are wearing the bills of their ball caps in front again.
The declining amount of headroom in a car undoubtedly has contributed to the decline of hat-wearing among men. Another contributing factor is evolving hairstyles: when men wore pomade as a matter of course, their hair could be counted on to survive being crushed by a hat and remain cemented into place. once the “dry look” took over, however, wearing a hat resulted in “hat hair.” The trend to longer hair for men exacerbated this. I have to keep my hair quite short on the sides to keep my fedora from ruining my hair.
Live a Lush Life
Da Chef
I try to keep my hair cut short, because an excess of hair sticking out from under a hat looks silly. That’s why I go to a barber shop. At a salon, you never know what you’re going to get – some freaky rock band style, I shouldn’t wonder.
They ask questions I don’t know the answer to, like, “Do you want it feathered?”
“Ah, I don’t know.”
“Layered?”
“Well…”
“How would you like your bangs cut?”
“Listen, can’t you just lower my ears a little?”
Then they have the nerve to charge 15-20 bucks! But, I can go to a barber shop and say, “Gimme the haircut that won the war” and they know exactly what I’m talking about and I walk out of there only ten bucks poorer after tip. Plus, the extra bonus, is that the haircut looks good with a fedora.
Well, Willie Brown, the mayor of San Francisco, who loves to overdress, usually wears a fedora. However, now that he’s trying for another term, it’s clear people are pretty sick of him (for many other reasons), so maybe that will help do in the fedora. When you listen to him and his only two significant contesters for the job, and take a poll in The City, you conclude the people on that side of the Bay would sure like to have a none-of-the-above slot on their ballots. Brown is pretty much all talk; Reilly is also, and has a record of having beat up a girlfriend; and Jordan is a right-winger who’s been there and been dumped once already.
I guess I sort of rode in on the early edge of the no-hat tide. . .and I hope it stays that way, certainly in severely moderate climates, such as Berkeley’s, particularly for those with severely all-weather skin. I don’t wear a hat when I go hiking even.
Since it appears that both men and women quit wearing hats over a period of about the same time, how can one blame the military for causing hatlessness?
A pox on those who would bring hats back. The idea of mens hats should always be associated with those of zuit-suiters or those of Cholo / NY Puerto Rican reversed baseball caps. . .and kept only in museums. And the idea of women’s hats should be associated with those superwide-brimmed feathery concoctions and the pile-of-fruit type. . .and kept in museums also. If living in Antarctica, either sex should be allowed to wear a simple tight ear-covering cap or parka; or if you’re very light-complexioned, you may wear a wide-brimmed straw hat in bright sunlight. Anything else should be at a penalty of a huge hat tax imposed to support my Society of Bareheaders (SOBs).
Also, if anyone wants to join me, we can wear ties that drop from the nape of the neck, in hopes that that will help rid the world of the notion of ties, in a manner similar to the effect backwards baseball caps had on hats. I also think pigtails (which could be pulled) helped rid us of beards, at one time, also. Of course, Berkeley reminds one of a barnyard. . .with all its inhabitants sporting rings in every appendage imaginable (and often exposed). Of course, everyone should have tattoos, because they don’t get in the way of anything. In fact, we could probably do away with clothes as decorations, in favor of tatoos – digital (1-0, not finger-toe) ones, of course, that could be run as animated gifs or Java or suh’m. That would serve the fashion industry right. All you’d have to do would be to download illegal MP3-coded files that would run your body’s multimedia integral garments.
Ray (If evolution had wanted you to have all those accessories, it’d’ve programmed them into your DNA.)
Of course you’re quite mad. There is a fairly specific range of hats associated with zoot suits.
But that’s okay. I notice a lot of people have trouble making what I’ve always thought were fairly obvious distinctions among various styles of hats. Here’s a bit of a primer for the non-hat conscious:
Indiana Jones did not wear a leather hat or any other jungle or wilderness style. He wore a brown fur felt fedora, of the kind that Stetson makes under the name Indiana Jones.
Movie gangsters mostly wore wide-brim fedoras.
The Blues Brothers wore black snap brim fedoras. If it ain’t snap brim, it ain’t Blues Brothers.
Tweedy snap brims are associated with old men in general and Paul “Bear” Bryant in particular.
None of the above constitute `pimp hats.’
In the Mississippi Delta, hats are alive and well in the black commmunity! I went to a funeral yesterday, and there were plenty of men wearing magnificent suit-matched hats. But, then isn’t a funeral where you would wear your best hat, so’s you could take it off and hold it over your heart as the casket passed??? The deceased, a beautiful blues musician, also always wore hats. For all of its harness(I don’t wanna start) this might just be the coolest place on earth…don’t tell anyone…
I noticed that in Montgomery, Alabama, there were an extraordinary number of shops that sold hats with a small area.
Pimp hats usually have a wide brim and a feather…
That just brings back images of “The Jerk” after he strikes it rich with the “Opti-Grab” and he has that 3 foot feather in his hat <laugh>
“She’s nothin but a little lyin’ ass bitch… I know she says she loves you but you know she don’t care…”
Raiders of the Lost Ark being one of the best movies ever and Indiana Jones being one of the best action/hero characters, the hat wearing did start up a bit for a while.
I myself thought about purchasing a similar hat, but felt I could not pull it off as my hero Indy did.
When I went to the Smithsonian back in the late 80s to see Indy’s hat, I was dismayed as to how they store it. It is stored without the trademark creases and looks more like a derby. I was told by my hat owning friend that that is how they store fedoras. But it does not look like Indy’s hat. You would think with all the technology available to us today that we could put our best scientists on discovering a way to store Indy’s hat the way he wore it.
Who is with me? Preserve Indy’s hat for future generations.
Jeffery
NanoByte, dear, please feel free to run about stark naked and covered in tatoos. The rest of us will tip our hats to you as you scamper by.
I’ve always had a thing for hats–dunno where it came from. As a little tyke visiting my grandfather in the '50s, I’d always wear his hats, and as a high school type in the early '60s I had a number of hats, something definitely not cool at the time. Of course, this was when many guys in HS in California had surfer big hair with the surfer bleach streak at the peak. By the end of the decade, with my hair down to my nipples, only a few styles of hats looked OK on that kind of hair, a leather newsboy, say. So if I were to guess, I would say that the longer, thicker hair that culminated in the excesses of the early '70s dealt a serious blow to hat wearing (I also like the car/hat hypothesis. Once cars started getting lower, around 1958, the headroom disappeared).
For the last eight years I’ve had really short hair, so my old hats have been brought out of storage. A brown felt fedora has seen travel on a number of continents (traveling on an airplane with a standard hat can be perilous to the hat). A tan Borsolino for warm weather; a dark gray fedora for winter. A light straw for really hot days, and a palm-frond Guatemalan gambler for really wet and nasty days (it’s also good in the snow–the wide brim keeps my camera dry when I whip the baggie off). And a Basque beret in place of a watch cap for early morning walks in the fog and cold.
As JA found, some people can react to these as “costume,” but it still doesn’t take away from their utility.