Kozlowski: Revive America’s hat-wearing tradition

Prepare your wardrobes: It’s about to get cold again.

When the weather finally turns… Prepare your wardrobes: It’s about to get cold again.

When the weather finally turns chilly, the usual fall clothing comes out: the hoodies, jeans and jackets we haven’t used for months. But sadly, I am one of the few people who will reach for a seemingly antiquated garment: a hat.

I am astonished that even when the temperature falls into the single digits, the percentage of people wearing hats is relatively small. And when a person does decide to wear a hat, it is almost invariably either a baseball hat or a stocking cap, with the occasional old geezer or oddball like myself sporting a fedora or beret. I don’t have anything against baseball hats or stocking caps — I wear both of them myself. But the serious lack of hat diversity is just a little alarming. The baseball cap in particular is limited to only a certain subset of events and temperatures. This is why we never see the pope in a baseball cap with a golden P on a white background, as cool as it would be to have a Vatican City cap.

For the most part, hats, like countless other sharp clothing items, are seriously out of fashion. This was, of course, not always the case. The reason so many old movies feature guys walking around in fedoras is that people actually dressed that way. Look at a photo of any large crowd gathered to hear word of the sinking of the Titanic or the stock market crash of 1929 and you will see a sea of hats. Presidents traditionally wore stovepipe hats to their inaugurations, the last one to do so being John F. Kennedy in 1961, although he didn’t wear it during the iconic inaugural address.

If we go even further back in history, we can see that at one time it was even acceptable to wear hats inside. For example, lines 92-93 of Act V, Scene 2 of “Hamlet” read, “Put your bonnet to his right use; ’tis for the head,” even though the character that says this is in a castle hallway. Women today are still allowed to wear hats in church, and even now, the more solemn and important the occasion — such as graduation — the funnier the hats people wear.

Why don’t more people wear hats daily? Although the catalyst for this decline might not be national, some publications, including Vice and Primer magazine, report that the blame often rests on Kennedy, who generally didn’t wear one and allegedly forever associated youthfulness with being bareheaded. Others blame cars for the decline of the hat, as it is hard to climb into and out of a car while wearing one.

I’m not particularly convinced by either of these arguments — although JFK might explain why our parents don’t wear hats, it doesn’t explain why we don’t. The car explanation also leaves something to be desired: It’s not like the car was invented in 1960 or that all cars built since then have been really compact.

Probably the best explanation is a paradoxical one. People don’t wear hats because nobody wears them, and this fact makes them less attractive to wear. This goes beyond the herd mentality or some Oedipal desire to kill our hat-wearing old man, and back to a simple practical consideration. Because there is no demand for them, very few places have hat or coat racks — so you can either hold your homburg in your lap or crudely toss it in the middle of the table at which you are sitting, hoping that it doesn’t get crushed wherever it ends up.

Contributing to the lack of hat diversity is the lack of information about headwear. You don’t have to settle for a hat that makes you look like a trucker, rapper, shortstop or that guy who says, “Are you ready for some football!?” on Monday night. You can look like a British banker, ’30s-style detective, American colonist and more just by finding a hat shop.

There are many reasons to wear hats. First, they keep the head warm. Although it’s a myth that most body heat is lost through the head, cold heads and ears are still unpleasant.

This does not mean that wearing a hat dooms one’s head to becoming a baked potato in July. Depending on the style of hat, more or less heat can be trapped. This is why people wear straw boaters on the Fourth of July and heavy felt in the winter. Brimmed hats also provide protection from the sun and rain.

More importantly, hats are stylish. Turn on any period drama where hats are worn and tell me that the actors don’t look sharp. Granted, some hats are ridiculous, like the wide-brimmed women’s ones that seem to feature an entire peacock or the heaviest and most ungainly of Napoleonic shakos. But by and large, even the funny hats do look sort of cool.

So I challenge you to look into getting yourself a hat that is somewhat beyond the mainstream. You’ll look and feel much better and be a part of something larger than yourself: reviving the moribund tradition of hat-wearing.

Write kozthought@gmail.com.