In former times, within living memory even, a hat was an all but mandatory accessory for men of all classes in Western society. You didn’t leave the house without a hat on, and per standard etiquette, you took it off when going back inside a house.
In the wintertime especially, I wear hats a lot. Baseball caps are also very common these days, many people don’t even take them off indoors (in breach of said etiquette), probably because when they come off, voila, hat hair!
The only way I’ve found to wear a hat without severe hat hair is either (a) to wear a size slightly too large, which doesn’t press as tightly on the hair but does make it easier for the hat to blow away, or (b) to wear a very close cropped hairstyle. And even solution (a) doesn’t help when the hat in question is a wool skullcap meant to cover the ears.
You’d think that with all the ingenuity Man exhibited in the 19th and early 20th Centuries - trains, planes and automobiles, heck even the development of the brassiere as we know it today - something would have been developed for hat hair that didn’t involve a handful of wet glop used to turn hair into wire coils.
Was that, in fact, the standard solution? Were pretty much all those fedora and porkpie wearing men in the US in the 1940s laying them on top of a layer of Brylcreem or something? Eeew.