What Happened to Hats?

by Read Listen Learn


"In New York in the 1940s and 1950s, everybody's in a suit , an overcoat and a hat."

If you look at two photographs of crowds, one old and the other more recent; ours is from about one hundred years ago. What difference do you notice? What does almost everyone have on their head in the old photo and very few people in the recent one? A hats. Or, more exactly hats and caps. Since human beings first started wearing any clothes, we have liked to have something on our heads.

There are many reasons. It keeps the rain and hot sun out of our eyes and off the head. It keeps the hair cleaner. It helps a lot with keeping warm in cold weather. It may show people who we are or what we do: a crown is for a king, a tall white cap is for a cook, a pointed, blue helmet may tell us that the wearer is a policeman in England. Other times, a hat may tell us that a person is religious and which religion they follow or it may tell us that they are upper-class or lower class - the hat may even tell us if the person is shy or outgoing. Some hats are national or ethnic and tell us where the person is from.

There are, of course, many other reasons why people wear hats. But why are less people doing so in modern cities which is where most of us live. People noticed this sixty years ago, when it started to happen, but nobody was sure why. Here are some possible reasons:

In Europe during the Second World War and for about five years after it, cloth and materials for clothes and hats were hard to get. If it came to choosing between a jacket and a hat, almost everyone chose the jacket and went without the hat. They quickly got used to it and did not go back to wearing hats even when it was no problem anymore.

Around the same time in history, people became, and wanted to be, more equal in how they behaved with each other. Hats told others about your social background and a man had to take his hat off to someone 'better' than him; if a man had no hat to take off then he could feel equal to everybody.

A very big factor, especially in North America, was the car. Before the car people had room to wear their hats when walking or on a train. The low roof of cars makes it difficult to wear a hat inside and, as Americans and others spent more and more time there, they wore hats less and less.

Then in the late 1960s, young men began to grow their hair very long. Long hair makes hats less necessary and, also, most fashion critics agree, hats look a lot better on a head with short hair. Hats on men with long hair sometimes look silly.

We should say here that, through all these changes in Europe, North America (and some other places), traditional populations elsewhere continued wearing hats. Hats are coming back into fashion now, though, and we see celebrities wearing them all the time. Now, they don't tell us if the person is rich or poor, and nobody takes their hat off to anyone else. They started to come back into fashion in the 1980s when men started cutting their hair short again. But perhaps the main reasons why hats are back are the common sense ones: they keep your head cool in the sun, warm in the cold and if it's raining, they keep your hair dry and tidy.