Great Hats for Men

“Men’s hats are a thing of the past.” That’s what they’re saying. Men’s hats are something of a relic, something we’ll probably never see again while we’re walking this planet and breathing this air. So, are hats dated and out of fashion?

If they are, you’d never know it by looking around today. Up until the last 40 years, 90% of men wore hats in public (women also wore their own kinds hats, but that’s for a different piece). Check out those 1940s and 1950s Yankee Stadium or Forbes Field game crowd shots. Men were dressed in various men’s hats, and most were dressed to the tee (wearing full suits and ties).

Question, when was the last time you saw a man at a ball game in a full suit? Don’t remember, do you? Wow! Have we ever fallen far in public decorum! Certainly we can get any more creative than a baseball cap turned backwards, can’t we? There has got to be some fresh creative genes still in the world, yes?

So, think about this question, back seventy or eighty years ago, why was there not an obsession with the bald head like there is today? To uncover that information you only need to watch a few movies from that era (black and white). I’ve probably watched hundreds, and I don’t recall many (if any) comments about a man growing bald. No bald jokes. No ‘bald is beautiful’ bits. It just wasn’t talked about in the movies.

Whether or not people discussed baldness in public is open for debate. And yet you know that things have not been altered that drastically.

Again, you see in the movies that when the men take off their hats, a significant number of them were bald or balding. What does that say about our society in general?

So either the men wore hats to hide their baldness, for which there’s no indication that it was a bad thing to be, or there were other reasons. I suspect it was to cover over their baldness, to adorn their heads, and to not stand out in a crowd (since everyone else would be wearing one).

For obvious reasons, men wore the hats during the winter months to keep their heads warm. Doctors tell us that 85% of body heat is lost through the hatless head. Wearing a hat in the winter, while it never protected the ears, kept the body heat from “leaking out” through the top. When summertime came, men just never took off their hats, sweat as they might.

In the next article, I’ll discuss the various types of men’s hats. And still to come is how to buy, care for, and wear men’s hats.