historical hat trends – Author Sarah Angleton

Hello blogosphere! I know it’s been a hot minute since I appeared in this space. It turned out I needed the break. I also have had less time to write as I spent the last school year working full-time at a middle school where I learned to use phrases like “it’s been a hot minute.” I had a great year and would happily return for another, but life is shifting again, as it does.

For well over a year now, my husband has been dealing with a long commute for a job that he loves. With our youngest son’s graduation from high school this spring, we’ve been looking to escape the bustling suburb that has been our home for more than a decade, searching for more land, a smaller house, and a shorter drive.

I’m pleased to report that we found all three, but as his route to work is shortening, mine is lengthening too much for my position to be practical. And that’s okay, because now, in between renovation projects on our new kind of weird house that sits on the pretty much perfect land, I can spend more time writing again.

Because when I see a majestic creature like this, the first thing I think is that it sure would look good in a hat. Minette Layne from Seattle, Washington, USA, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I’m excited to be back. I’ve missed this sharing of vaguely historical and occasionally hysterical tidbits, kind of like one misses the hottest trends of their childhood. I’m seriously at least as excited as I would be if celebrities suddenly started wearing acid wash jeans again, we all decided to walk like an Egyptian, or whales donned dead salmon hats.

Okay, so you may not have been entirely hip to Orca culture of the late 1980s like I have recently pretended to be, but yes, apparently, there was a brief window of time in 1987 when trendy killer whales, particularly those who frequented the Puget Sound, placed jaunty dead fish on their enormous heads.

Why they did this researchers aren’t sure, but then acid wash jeans didn’t make a lot of sense either. Some suggest it was a clever way to save some food for later during times of abundance. Orcas have been known to swim with large chunks of food tucked under a fin, a mode of transportation that isn’t terribly practical for a relatively small fish like a salmon. That fits much better as a hat.

Or it could just be a playful fashion statement that this year has seen a little bit of a comeback. It’s definitely not as wide-spread as it was in 1987, but then I suppose the retro look isn’t for everyone.

In case you want to dress like a fashionable Orca, Amazon has you covered.

Still, there have been a few instances over the past several months of Orcas once again sporting dead fish hats, enough to get some in the whale fashion industry to declare it a hot trend of the season, similar to the boat rudder disabling challenge that cropped up a couple years ago or the orca kelp massage fad surging right now, that is surely the result of a whale lifestyle influencer.

And why not bring back a little bit of fun, like a silly hat in a great big briny sea, or one more hopefully amusing, poorly researched, sort-of history blog written by a real human being drifting in a metaphorical sea of the artificially intelligent web.

I mean, I’m not walking like an Egyptian, but I am pretty excited to be back.

School has begun, Labor Day has come and gone, the pumpkins have ripened too early, and there’s a hint of cool in the air. Despite the calendar’s insistence that there are still eleven more days of summer, it’s starting, in my corner of the world, to feel a little bit like fall. That means it’s time to put out the scarecrows, trim up the flower beds, and think about trading out your straw hat for one made of felt or silk.

These are the kind of big, beautiful pumpkins that will make great Jack-o-lanterns. Too bad someone forgot to tell them that Halloween is still almost two months away.

Or at least that’s what you would have done had you been a gentleman living in the US in the first couple decades of the twentieth century and you cared about such things. Most men didn’t. Not really anyway. But there was a fun tradition highlighted by an article from the Pittsburgh Press in September of 1910 in which stockbrokers jovially destroyed one another’s straw hats if their colleagues were careless enough to wear them after September 15.

That’s all in good fun, I guess, if you find that sort of thing amusing. But the same article mentions an incident in which the police had to intervene on behalf of the straw-hat-wearing average Joe on the street who occasionally found himself unexpectedly bareheaded.

By 1922 the straw hat smashing shenanigans had risen to a new level. On September 13 of that year, two days prior to the unofficially official straw hat smashing day, a group of boys decided to get the party started at Mulberry Bend in the Five Points Region of Manhattan.

So wait, how do the scarecrows get away with such a blatant fashion faux pas? Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

As factory and dock workers left work for the evening, the boys began yanking straw hats off passersby and smashing them in the streets. Probably not surprisingly, some of the hatless victims got upset and a brawl broke out.

The police managed to bring the crowd under control without much more than a couple of arrests, but the conflict didn’t end there. Over the next few nights, riots broke out all over the city. There were more arrests, a lot of angry parents accompanying their teenage children home from jail, and some pretty brutal beatings in the streets. Many men were treated for injuries and least one was hospitalized. Over straw hats.

What began as kind of a quaint tradition used by businessmen to razz one another at work became a serious public safety issue in New York over the next several years when September rolled around. 1924 saw the first murder attributed to the unforgivable sin of wearing a straw hat out of season.

I’m sure that like me, and any other reasonable person, you find this picture completely infuriating. Maybe even worthy of a riot. Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

Fortunately, the straw hat rioting eventually died out. In 1925, then President Calvin Coolidge commented that he didn’t much care about switching hats, which seemed to calm everyone down a bit. It also helped that straw hats fell out of fashion and so it wasn’t long until no one was wearing them anyway. Then the Great Depression hit and people had more important things to worry about.

But for a while in US history, the kind of violence and destruction that shutters businesses, damages property, and endangers innocent people, occurred at the literal drop of a hat.

Boy, I sure am glad we’re past that.