Hatless Jack: The President, the Fedora and the Death of the Hat by Neil Steinberg
This is another one of those books that can change the way you look at things forever. I see that it’s now out-of-print and that’s a shame, it deserves to be better known, not because it’s perfect, but at least partly because it’s pretty much the ONLY treatment of its subject.
From a modern viewpoint, if you look at any old movie right up through the 1950s you’ll see immediately that practically every man wore a hat outside all the time. It was an integral part of our culture that everyone took for granted, any establishment catering to men at all had to accommodate hats, whether it was just with hooks or “hat-check girls” or hat-and-cloak rooms. You can go back as far as you like, decade after decade, through films to photographs to paintings, and you’ll find virtually every single man in European culture wearing a hat outside as far back as ancient Greece, thousands of years ago… and probably further.
And yet, starting from the 1960s on, the hats just- disappear, outside of cowboy country. Suddenly nobody was wearing them anymore in public or in popular representations like film. What happened?
The popular culture has pointed to President John Kennedy as starting the fashion, and he was famously hatless in public virtually all the time, but this book reveals other undercurrents. It turns out that hat-wearing, especially in the US, actually peaked in the 1920s and was well into decline by the time JFK appeared in the public eye.
The hat is an imminently practical, almost necessary device for people of European decent spending a great deal of time outdoors on foot, and that is key to what started to decline in the US in the 1920s… with the advent of the automobile. At first with roofless or convertible models it became almost impossible to keep a brimmed hat in place while traveling at speeds far exceeding those of riding horseback, and then later with hard-top models it became a nuisance to manage in a car, or getting in and out of a car. That seems to have precipitated a slow decline in hat wearing, and then when it suddenly became very fashionable to go hatless in the 1960s with the JFK administration, Detroit automakers promptly lowered the roofs of new cars, saving themselves money in several ways, and never raised them again, making it almost impossible for the fashion of wearing hats to return. At the same time, when demand disappeared and hat sales suddenly became history the manufacturing capability was virtually abandoned, and hat quality declined almost to the Halloween-costume level, so that those men who tried hat-wearing for the first time universally found it a miserable and impractical experience. At the same time, when it suddenly became fashionable, Hollywood stars found that they very much liked having their faces much more visible to the camera in many outside shots and became another force of resistance to the fashion ever making a comeback.
Now feminists are trying to shame men out of any attempt to return to hat-wearing, making it a gender issue and deriding hat-wearing men as being sexist… at least in the sense that men doing anything, no matter how personal, without seeking female approval and permission is now understood to be intrinsically sexist.
Hat quality in the US and much of the rest of the world probably bottomed out sometime in the 1970s, and, like the quality of automobiles, has been on a slow ascent ever since but at much, much higher prices, and felt hat quality at hundreds of dollars each still doesn’t quite equal what was considered moderate quality in the 1940s.
– Robert the Wombat