Cars and Hygiene Killed the Middle-Class Hat

The good doctor isn’t incorrect. Outside of the faith community, head covers have largely played a utilitarian role. In nonworship settings, one of the primary reasons for a cover is simply to keep a person’s head warm, dry, clean, or out of the sun.

Basically, hats have been essential in many, many cultures as a way to protect a person’s dome from the elements.

A hat could protect a person from the rain, the wind, or the soot from local smokestacks. Long before SPF 55 was readily available, hats were also the single biggest protector from the sun. The sweatband could catch beads of perspiration before they got into your eyes. And at a time when showering regularly wasn’t especially feasible, hats could also keep environmental dirt and grime away from the hair.

The advents of standing showers, shampoo, and an interest in more stylish hairstyles were very much a part of the hat’s demise. Every time a man removed his cover, he’d need to recomb his hair, which was often slicked back or parted to the side. As longer, more styled hair became the style in the 1950s — think Elvis’s close cut and James Dean’s artful mess — coifs and covers were at odds.

The modernization of the Western lifestyle also brought with it new protections. The first pair of sunglasses, introduced in 1929, helped eliminate the need for a brim to shade the eyes. Sunglasses were further developed for soldiers during World War II, and by the mid-1940s, they had become popular among regular folks. Additionally, the first sunscreens were introduced to the public in the late 1940s.

A family heads into town on a Saturday afternoon in Georgia in 1941. Source: Library of Congress

Lifestyle changes also contributed to the hat’s obsolescence. Industrialization and modernization meant, for much of the population in Western Europe and North America, spending less time spent in the fields, doing laundry outdoors, or walking long stretches at a time. As such, a hatless head wasn’t a liability, but instead a mark of liberation.

It would be incorrect, however, to say that people suddenly looked around and realized they could go outside without their customary cover. In addition to changes in the environment and lifestyle, the downfall of the hat has long been linked to politics. In fact, many armchair historians will still tell you that the hat became a thing of the past when a certain man took the Oval Office — though that is not strictly accurate.

Which President to Blame: JFK or Ike?

Presidents are rarely on the cutting edge of fashion — James Monroe was woefully off-trend, and it seems unlikely that Donald Trump will usher in an era of ill-fitting suits and gigantic ties — but two leaders of the free world are most often fingered as the ones who killed the hat.

First, there’s handsome, dapper, Catholic John F. Kennedy, who famously appeared at his inauguration in 1961 without a hat. Kind of.

Kennedy photographed in Ireland in June 1963. He is not wearing a hat, but then neither is almost anyone else. Source: White House

In the collective memory, JFK has been frequently blamed for the downfall of the hat. This is due in large part to our anachronistic recollection of his inauguration on January 20, 1961. Kennedy did, in fact, forgo his hat during his swearing in and speech, as seen in file footage. Looking at the film, however, it’s clear that he’s not the only one without a lid; many people in the audience, even after the part with the hand on the Bible, are not wearing covers.

“It is true that Kennedy almost never wore a hat after becoming president,” reads a Snopes article about this particular theory of the hat’s demise, “but his hatlessness was much more likely the continuation of a trend that had long since begun, not its origin.”

Kennedy continued to go hatless for the majority of his presidency and was often photographed with his hair blowing in the breeze. This — and not so much the inauguration itself — is more likely the root of the idea that JFK was responsible for the hat’s decline. But that also wasn’t uncommon for the time; by the mid-1960s, hats were pretty sparse in crowd shots and footage. In fact, Snopes points out, numerous other presidents had been party to the decline of hats in public — most notably, JFK’s predecessor.

RadioLab co-host Robert Krulwich argues that it’s actually Dwight Eisenhower who brought the hat down — though less directly.

Writing for NPR in 2012, Krulwich explains that perhaps the hat’s fate wasn’t the result of a sartorial choice, but rather one related to infrastructure.

This theory falls much closer in line with the reality of the changes that the United States and much of the Western world was undergoing after World War II. As our lives began to look different, fashion followed.

“Until cars became the dominant mode of personal transport, there was no architectural reason to take your hat off between home and office,” wrote Krulwich. “With Dwight Eisenhower’s interstate highway system came cars, and cars made hats inconvenient, and for the first time men, crunched by the low ceilings in their automobiles, experimented with hat removal and got to like it.”

Industrialization already meant people walked less — public transit brought people inside for their commute — and the popularity of automobiles only furthered what mass transit had begun. The car’s less-spacious ceiling, though, certainly contributed to the hat’s decline.

Hat wearing did not, however, go gentle into that good night. Before the fall of the fedora was complete, there was one big push to save it.

The Struggle to Save the Hat

Before World War I, ready-to-wear fashion was already dealing substantial blows to the bottom lines of local hatters, and it only became more dire in the postwar world. Like many other objects, hats became more expensive but less well-made (inflation and increased material costs drove up consumer prices and reduced access to textiles, prompting manufacturers to cut corners and hike costs), but they were also more readily available. The shift toward cars and clean hair certainly wasn’t helping, either — and hatters were feeling it.

The Hat Research Foundation lobbied to make hats cool again. Source: Pinterest

In the early 1940s, a group of “136 manufacturers and more than 3,500 associate retail members started the first industry-wide sales effort in hat history” for the sole purpose of keeping the hat in style — and, specifically, encouraging men to purchase their hats not from a chain store, but from a recognized hatter.

Under the moniker “the Hat Research Foundation,” the group pooled its resources to take out ads in prominent publications. The foundation — which was really just a way for hatters like Stetson to stop a growing movement that threatened sales— was designed to “discourage the recent tendency of men not to wear hats,” according to a 1955 report from the Ford Foundation. The Hat Research Foundation sponsored events like National Hat Week, put money behind pop music, and tried to place positive press about the continued popularity of hats.

A 1949 New Yorker article quoted E.A. Korchnoy, president of the Hat Research Foundation, as saying that college students had begun “going without hats as a symbol of status,” an alarming development that he sought to correct.

“Candidly,” Korchnoy told the New Yorker, “the hat, as part of the ensemble, has been neglected far too long.”

The piece also quotes Korchnoy as stating that college students were finally coming back to hats, and that the tide would certainly turn.

That was not to be, though; the foundation’s efforts fell short. Despite heaping cash into its campaign to keep hats cool and chic, the industry couldn’t manage to get ahead of the day’s new styles. While older gentlemen continued to don their high-crowned hats whenever they left the house, younger people simply weren’t moved by the marketing.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/2W1Gsz3