When I was about seven years of age, I used to enjoy reading Archie comics, the reason being that at that age anything to do with teenagers was cool because they were big enough to drive, go out on their own, and everything. But I always wondered why Jughead wore a “crown”.
At some later point in life I realized that boys used to wear these soft hats that had upturned pointy edges, and usually there would be various pins stuck into the crown of the hat. What I had taken to be jewels stuck in Jughead’s “crown” were really just pins in a soft hat. It seems like these hats were a normal part of boy’s attire.
So I’m curious. What is the story with these hats? When did they come in style and where? Was it only in big cities, as it appears from the context of old movies? And when did they go out of style?
We’ve had questions about these before on the Board. If you look on Lileks’ site (www.lileks.com) in the “OLd Ads” section you can find an ad for a “Whoopie hat”, which is a cloth cap that is basically a concave pieces of cloth (felt?) with the edge turned back and cut into points like a “crown”. I get the impression these came out in the 1930s, and comic strip illustrators found them irresistable. I think they look kinda dumb, and I suspect that, after the initial flush of novelty wore off, the kids thought so, too. I’d be willing to bet they died out in the 1940s, after which only holdovers like Jughead Jones and kids in Little Lulu wore them.
There more advanced than you think . . . don’t forget that in the short-lived Jughead’s Time Police, it was revealed that his hat came from the future . . . I’m serious.
They were made by cutting the brim off any old felt hat, then cutting the base of the crown into the, well, “crown” pattern, and flipped up. This shape was used for the same reason pinking shears cut in the same zig-zag: it frays slower.
When felt hats went out of style, so did the practice of recycling them into beanies.
My mom made a couple of these out of felt for me and 2 brothers (it was my punk brother’s idea first). We liked them and wore them in public during our respective college and HS years–I would put my hair in braids and the hat on top. I still have mine.
Basically, it was what kids in the 20s and 30s did for a hat. You cut up your dad’s old felt hat to make it more “cool” and kid-compatible. I think it started out as something only the “poor kids” did, but with the popularity of such films as “The Bowery Boys” (Dead End Kids), etc., it became a style.
Cite? Sorry, it was something I read about a long time ago, and a quick Google search didn’t turn anything up.
We still called them beanies in the early 1950’s. I had one that had soda bottle caps on it. The last time I wore one was in about 1963 when I pledged a sorority.
There are “beanies” on the market today, but they look more like the knitted naval hats that men wore at sea. There are also some that have the concave shape but they are not made of felt and don’t have the pointy parts. That’s no fun…
I had to be sure and thank you for telling me about that site. It’s one of the funniest general sites I’ve seen. Maybe he’s just got the same style sense of humor as I do.
Origins (I forgot to add this to my post above, because I was at work): The Doughboys.
After the Civil War the US adopted the felt campaign hat as standard headgear. At first a fore-and-aft crease was worn, but around the turn of the century this changed to the 4-dent Montana peak now work by drill instructors, state troopers, etc. Ventillation was originally a pair of small holes with wire screens on the sides, but this changed to a snowflake pattern of small grommeted holes, blah, blah, blah.
Anyway, when sent to France in 1917-18, the felt hat was an incumbrance when the soldier had to wear his helmet. Instead, and ever since then, the Army and Marines have worn the foldable flat hat that, with that well-developed sense of homoerotic sadomasocism common to all soldiers, somone dubbed the 'pisscutter."
What to do with thousand of useless campaign hats? The brims were cut into panels and sewn into hospital slippers, as much to give bored soldiers something to do as give sick ones something to wear, and the crowns were left for whatever boredom they too could relieve.
