Watching the older “Dragnet” shows and other B&W TV shows it is evident that a man was considered undressed unless he had a hat. What happened to hats as everday wear, even in clear weather? What killed them off?
JFK killed off hats. He had a lot more hair than his predecessors, and started going around without a hat. The rest is history.
More frequent bathing? If your hair wasn’t a mess of dirt and grease, perhaps you felt more like showing it off instead of hiding it under a hat. Hats survived a bit longer for women since they were still decorative after the need for them to cover up greasy hair had passed.
They aren’t dead. People just wear modern hats called baseball caps. It just appears that way because of a style change.
I am doing my able best to revive the fedora, but I only wear mine when it’s cold.
The counterculture movement. Hippies weren’t very “big” on fedoras.
Fedoras are cool. I got a brown one and black one.
I rarely wear them anymore though.
It’s problematic to say they were endemic at any one point, or unheard of at any other point. I was surprised to learn from my father that he essentially never wore a hat, including upon his departure to/enrollment in college in the early '50s. I would have thought it would have been de rigeur, but he says no – only for swells, at that time, as far as he knew.
On the other hand, some have kept wearing hats. Apart from old guys, check out certain middle-aged black men, who constitute the majority of sharp fedora-wearing individuals (usually only in the Fall/Winter) that I continue to see, in not-insubstantial numbers, on city streets these days.
Hats died out as a fashion trend about the time JFK came into office (though it had nothing to do with JFK).
Why? They became unfashionable. And there is no real logic behind what is fashionable and what’s not.
I always wear a hat outdoors, BTW – baseball caps in summer (to keep the sun out of my eyes) and various caps in winter to keep my head and ears warm.
Gorbachev wore a fedora…and look what happened to him! Course the guy was bald…come to thinkof it…Al Rocker wears a fedoratoo!
I have always felt that at least a portion of the lack of popularity of hats comes from automobile design.
In years prior to the late '50s cars were (for the most part) designed with a great deal of head room which would accomodate virtually any style of hat. And men did indeed usually drive their sedans and coupes while wearing their hats.
Yes, it was/is possible to remove a hat while driving, and then remount it after one leaves a car, but it adds a level of complication that did not exist privious to the lower roofed cars.
In roughly 1956 and '57 mainstream automobiles (read Detroit) really began the push for the lower profile cars and soon after people began seeing fewer and fewer hats on both sexes.
Virtually the only vehicle to retain the larger head room was the pickup. I should point out that if you visit rural areas even today, many if not most pickup drivers still wear some sort of head gear. Yes, in urban and suburban areas where pickups have been adopted, this is not always the case.
It could be argued (and it probably will be) that I have the events in question backwards. The streamlining of automobiles came about as a result of men (and to a lesser extent women) becoming hatless, but I am inclined to disagree. I am old enough to remember my father grumbling as he removed his hat as he climbed into our 1957 Ford, but not my mother’s 1948 Pontiac. At the same time I remember men and women wearing hats as they traveled in the older cars and being hatless in the newer ones.
Yes, it could be that the hip (or hep) and hatless were the ones driving the newer cars, but I tend to disagree.
Granted this is not a fully developed thesis, and I am willing to accept other cultural aspects such as fewer individuals going to and from work on foot and better heated transportation but I think it is indeed a major contributing factor.
TV
Its just one more peice of clothing that I have to make sure coordinates with what I’m wearing. Thats more trouble than its worth.
Fedoras were on the decline already when JFK was elected. Low, sleek cars were a part of it, because a man could no longer drive in a hat.
Newspaper accounts of Kennedy’s inauguration mentioned his hatlessness. He said he was all set to wear a Homburg hat to the highly traditional rite. His daughter laughed at the sight of her Daddy in a hat, though, and told him he looked silly. Now, it’s possible that the whole story was cooked up for the press, but it did come from the White House.
Ask not what Ike wore four years ago. Ask your daughter how you look.
Maybe Jack didn’t look good in a hat, but I do.
When my '66 MGB is restored, I want to get a pork-pie hat.
Ahem. I’ll be having the roast crow with a horseradish and orange sauce, please. New potatoes, and a mixed green salad. A glass of the house white wine.
Please ignore my previous, incorrect, bonehead post. Thank you.
Have any of you ever tried wearing a full Victorian get-up costume, with all of the clothes they wore?
It’s very hot to wear in an already heated room.
The Victorians and Edwardians lacked a great deal of indoor central heating for a majority of their lives and dressed accordingly, wearing very heavy clothing.
Hats basically protect the head from cold, and are still worn at wintertime up here in Canada.
The reason people stopped wearing them is because they stopped being cold, they had central heating, and their cars had warmers in them, unlike the frigid hansom cabs of old.
AskNott did you even read the many posts that were above yours, where Kennedy’s hatlessness was summarily debunked?
Hats were de rigeur for years and years across the western world. Cars have nothing to do with their popularity.
[quote]
He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. [/quite]CK Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday
They also seem to have died out simultaneously across the west, except for the baseball cap: we can always spot Americans over here, since, apart from a small subculture of indigenous young men, they are the only ones wearing hats.
That’s funny. It’s my impression that it’s baseball caps that are to blame for killing ‘real’ hats.