Remember back in the good old days when men were always wearing hats? When and why did that stop? They always wore suits too, but I don’t particularly yearn for a return to that. The hats thing would be pretty cool, though.
Did this chapeau-less movement happen suddenly? Gradually?
You watch the old movies from ‘the hat era,’ and it was so gloriously politically incorrect. People had whiskey bottles in their desk drawers at work! Everybody was always smoking and drinking.
Whenever I see a guy kiss a woman passionately in one of those movies, all I can think about is how atrocious everybody’s breath must have been.
“I am a news-paper man, damn it! Come to the point with me, sir, or take your business elsewhere!” - T. Herman Zweibel, Publisher, The Onion
Publisher
The Onion
This topic has been done before, but as the search function on this site is less than useless, I am no help at all in leading you to the thread where it was spoken about.
The answer to men foregoing headwear is found in the insidious nature of politics influencing our daily lives.
Up through the '50s men wore hats as a matter of course. There may even have been some kind of informal rite of passage in switching from a baseball cap or more casual headgear to an actual fedora or something, kinda along the lines of a kid going from knickers to long pants.
Anyway…
Casual observation of photos and film footage of the time shows that, after JFK was elected, men’s hats were not as prominent, especially among younger men. It seems that most of the guys wearing hats in the '60s are more on a par, age-wise, with Eisenhower’s generation.
JFK didn’t wear hats, as he had quite a thatch of thick hair and perhaps he didn’t want to be caught by photographers with “hat hair.” Not very presidential. But I believe the decline in fedora sales can be traced pretty directly to the fact that, in an unconscious effort to emulate Kennedy’s handsome, youthful, vigorous image, many younger men in the U.S. stopped wearing hats. Hey, how many women started wearing tailored suits, pearls and pillbox hats because of Jackie? Men aren’t immune to such things, in spite of what they claim.
I love hats myself. There’s something cool and rakish about a fedora. I often get compliments on mine.
The Dave-Guy
“since my daughter’s only half-Jewish, can she go in up to her knees?” J.H. Marx
Yes. this topic has been done to death, on this board and others. Yes also, the SDMB search is about as useful as testicles on a telephone, so let’s repeat:
It’s generally accepted that the fashion of men wearing hats went out in the late '50s and early '60s. This was when John F. Kennedy was truly prominent in US culture and fashion. He didn’t wear hats, and the bare-headed style style caught on.
It’s a shame, really; if Jackie could have persuaded her hubby JFK to wear a steel/kevlar-lined bowler, our history might have turned out differently.
–Da Cap’n
“Playin’ solitaire 'til dawn
With a deck of fifty-one.”
Back in the goold ol’ 1960s, heavy LSD use and listening to Beatles records liberated us from the necessity of hat-wearing. Death to hats, the tool of the military-industrial crypto-Fascist insect!
Just to play devil’s advocate to the inevitable rush of “Oh Lord I wish we all still wore hats” posts, I’ll repeat an old MAD magazine joke that refers to a hat-problem we’ve all forgotten over the last forty years:
“This is an eighty-dollar hat…I spent twenty on it a year ago, and sixty since then buying it back from hatcheck girls.”
Yes, Guanolad, I was thinking it was about the pop group as well. As soon as I saw the subject, I started hearing “S…A…F…E…T…Y…” going through my head. Now I’m going to have to kill somebody. I hate it when that happens.
JFK killed the hat? This seems to be a very Ameri-centric explantion. I’m not convinced his glamour took hold of the entire world to such an extent, otherwise all men would be wearing helmuts after his tragic ‘loss of office’.
“Back in the good ol’ 1960s, heavy LSD use and listening to Beatles records liberated us from the necessity of hat-wearing. Death to hats, the tool of the military-industrial crypto-Fascist insect!”
–Alright, now you’re just TRYIN’ to get under my skin, ya big moke. Well it won’t work, I am ticked-off at so many people today that you’re WAY down on my list–won’t even get to ya till after the first of the year . . .
I bought my last hat in the 60s and don’t miss them a bit.
However during the hat wearing days men observed the respectful custom of removing their hats in a restaurant or family home-----unless,of course there was some religious requirement.
That custom I wish would return ----let all the idiots ,of every age, who wear those ridiculous baseball caps, stick them in their pockets and act like they’ve had at least a little bringing up!
I would recommend a movie called Fear of a Black Planet for a very funny discussion about not wearing hats … Couldn’t possibly begin to summarize it here.
Actually, Wolfduke, it’s not out of the question that JFK would have a fairly large effect on hat wearing worldwide. He was the acknowledged leader of the free world, after all.
Also, it seems to me the OP was primarily concerned with hat wearing in this country (or the Western Hemisphere in general). Anyway, the Russkies and Soviet satellite states would continue to wear hats regardless of JFK 'cause it’s cold over there.
The Dave-Guy
“since my daughter’s only half-Jewish, can she go in up to her knees?” J.H. Marx
Men Wearing Hats: old black and white movies, enormous baggy suits, jaunty fedoras perched rakishly atop the craniums. Accompanied by dames wearing hats of their own, and little veils; those awful stoles made of dead minks complete with heads biting each other’s tails. Right out of an old Batman comic book! Dick Tracy = Man Wearing Hat. Those days went out with women wearing panty girdles!
