How Cars and Hygiene Killed the Middle-Class Hat

Don’t blame JFK

A crowd photo taken by the Bain News Service shows a whole lot of people in hats crowded around to hear opera singer Geraldine Farrar in 1918. Source: Library of Congress

Few accessories have been more roundly mocked in the past several years than the lowly fedora. Once associated with cool guys like Humphrey Bogart and Indiana Jones, the wide-brimmed beauty has become synonymous with online harassment and a steady diet of Hot Pockets. Forget, of course, that most “fedoras” are actually trilbies (please, please forget it), and recall instead that before this hat style became almost universally panned, it (or something similar to it) was worn on a daily basis by the majority of middle-class men for decades.

The drop-off in hat wearing was fairly precipitous. Prior to the mid-1960s, most middle-class adults in the Western world didn’t go outside without some kind of cover, whether it was a Panama, cloche, fedora, beret, or silk scarf. Archival photos of events around the turn of the 20th century show seas of caps and hats in just about every crowd shot — until sometime before the Summer of Love, when they all but disappeared.

This is a well-documented turn of events, and one that plenty of people — mostly men hoping to revive the glory days of millinery, it seems — have pondered for…