It varied somewhat over time, but September 15th is the date most regarded as Felt Hat Day.
Okay, I know what you’re thinking, this is the sort of silly concession granted by politicians to lobbyists who don’t actually raise very much money for them… like, five thousand dollars might get you a Peanut Butter Fudge Day in West Des Moines.
Not at all. This used to be very serious stuff. People even got hurt over it. Check this out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_Hat_Riot (“Straw Hat Riot” on Wikipedia)
(I always thought that “Straw Hat Riot” was one of the best candidates for a band name I’d ever heard).
Once upon a time,and not so long ago, men wore hats. Everyone wore hats. In fact, there was never a time in thousands of previous years when they did not.
As with anything that people do for thousands of years, here were good reasons for it. Some of those reasons still apply, though most of them had to do with being outside a lot, including outside of cars… which is not a necessity you can always predict. Going around bare-headed is in fact a very modern affectation only dating from the past handful of decades, one that is purely symptomatic of our unbelievably sheltered and controlled lives, and one that on the broader scale of human history probably won’t last.
In any case, today is traditionally the first day of the fall on which it was socially obligatory for a man to wear a felt hat, and no longer acceptable for him to wear a straw hat (boater, Panama) outside of the Tropics. Felt hats were worn until Straw Hat Day on May 15th.
That’s good and bad news- I have a lot of felt hats and don’t mind wearing them a bit, so it’s one of the tiny bright spots to look forward to in this generally dreary time of year, but whereas straw hats tend to “dress down” well, many traditional fedora styles just do not seem to go well with very casual clothing… which in this day and age is a problem, since fewer and fewer people dress up for fewer and fewer occasions every year. There’s just something fundamentally ridiculous about wearing a slate-gray snap-brim fedora with a wide black ribbon with a t-shirt, shorts and sandals. It doesn’t work.
I’ve attacked the problem largely by styling my own less-formal-looking felt hats, usually starting with an open-crown Akubra Campdraft (American hats have only slightly recovered from their sad state of decline in recent decades). Some are patterned after the Akubra “RM”, and one is a frank and admittedly inferior copy of an earlier iteration of the Black Sheep Hats Tumblehome. I end up with hats that are not quite classic fedoras, not Western nor completely Australian, with either very thin ribbons or leather hatbands that make them inherently more casual, and by choosing tan, beige, light brown and green hats to start with.
The practice of wearing felt hats in this day and age does meet with some resistance.. It hasn’t been considered entirely acceptable since the 1960’s, but I’m frankly past an age where I have an interest in conforming like a lemming to nonsensical fashion. If I’m the only person in sight with brains enough not to go out bare-headed in the rain, and the only one not delighted in flaunting our new status as extremely dependent, over-protected, nearly-helpless and almost-completely domesticated creatures, so be it.
– Robert the Wombat