One of the most striking things about real-life footage of Americans from the advent of the camera until around 1970 is that nearly all men, and many women, are wearing hats. In footage from the 1940s, for example, men boarding the subway to go to work are almost always seen in fedoras, trilbys, or homburgs. Earlier clips show them in bowlers and top hats.
It’s as if, before TV turned color, Americans were a nation of conformists who all dressed the same way. So how did men across the Western world go from wearing hats every day for decades to suddenly going bareheaded? Preston Schlueter of the Gentleman’s Gazette outlines four reasons in a YouTube video with more than 2 million views.
Four reasons why men stopped wearing hats
1. Climate control
“One of the biggest reasons for the loss of hat-wearing is likely that we now have better control over our indoor climate than we used to,” Schlueter says. “This is also why men can now go in and out of doors wearing sometimes fewer than two layers of clothing, and why things like gloves and scarves aren’t as popular as they used to be.”
2. Social class
“Social class was an incredibly important aspect of Western society, and people were absolutely expected to know their place,” Schlueter says. “But, after the horrors of war brought every social class just a bit closer, we began to focus more on the individual, rather than on the class in which they resided. As a result, then, the practice of wearing clothing and, particularly, hats to signify yourself as part of a distinct group has become largely extinct.”
3. Highways and cars
Back in the day, when transportation consisted of subway cars, trolley cars, horse-drawn buggies, or horseback travel, there was plenty of headroom, even for someone wearing a top hat. However, with the advent of the automobile, headroom in vehicles changed drastically.
“Look up at the ceiling in your own car. How much headroom do you have there? The answer is probably not much, perhaps even for a relatively soft or short hat style,” Schlueter says. “Simply put, modern cars aren’t built to accommodate the hat styles of old.”
4. The Internet
“In the last decade and a half or so, hats like the fedora and trilby have gained an increasingly negative reputation thanks to Internet memes from websites like 4chan, Reddit, and Tumblr,” Schlueter says. “Indeed, for some younger members of our audience, when we mention fedoras, they might first think of the infamous ‘tips fedora’ meme. Because there are now thousands of these easily spreadable memes all over the Internet, the fedora, in recent years, took on a decidedly less-than-cool reputation.”
Hats are due for a comeback
In the end, there are many reasons people stopped wearing fancy hats every day. It appears to be a confluence of historical events, technological progress, and social pressures that influenced this major shift in fashion. But that doesn’t mean the era of the hat is gone forever. If one thing is certain, what goes out of fashion is always bound to come back.
