The Fedora Chronicles
In response to the book "Hatless Jack: The President, the Fedora, and the History of American Style" Robert T. West gives us his own perspective on why fedoras lost popularity and why they were no longer worn by most men in the second half of the 20th Century.

"The Silent Generation who didn't wear fedoras"

Robert T. West
There are undoubtedly a lot of reasons for the decline of hatwearing, and it's been pretty well gone over. Men have been wearing hats for at least ten thousand years, and I regard the last fifty years or so as the oddity. I'm confident hat wearing will be the norm again, it's just a question of when.

Because I've been noticing the pronounced increase of hats being worn in my own area very recently, I've become more interested in the question of "why now?", even if it's just a passing trend, this time.

I think the author, Neil Steinberg, might have missed a couple of things. My own father said that he didn't like hats because he was forced to wear one in the Navy, and the author covers that argument, but I wonder if that was really the whole story at the time.

My father talked about his own generation, that he said was called "the silent generation". These were the sons and sometimes younger brothers of what Tom Brokow has dubbed "the greatest generation", the men who fought World War Two. What we tend to lose sight of, is that that is the way they were regarded then, and how very dominant they were in their own time. Men returning from wars have not been treated that way in the US since.

My father talked about having to compete in every realm with the guys returning from the war- in college, with the veterans funded by the GI Bill, and in the workplace having to compete for jobs with returning heroes. He talked about how intimidating it could be to work with guys who had faced down death, who felt that they could accomplish anything, and to whom the struggles of civilian life, that the "silent generation" was just learning to cope with, seemed "easy" by comparison.

Even the war that the "silent generation" fought (Korea) was completely overshadowed, and when they returned, having done their part and their duty like their fathers and older brothers, they did not return to the homecoming they might have expected- that they might have had a right to expect.

I'm wondering if going hatless became a sort of tacit way for a lot of that generation to try to differentiate themselves from "the greatest generation", to try to move out of their shadow a bit. Yes, implicit in stating that they were a different generation, they were also stating that they were younger. After all, hat's didn't disappear when the returning WWII veterans entered the workplace, despite thier complaints at being forced to wear them- they didn't disappear until at least a decade later, when a different generation was beginning to make it's influence known, however quietly.

The shadow of the guys who fought World War Two was huge, and I wonder if we're still seeing the effects.

It's now a new millenium, and we are the generations that came after "the silent generation", and were by and large brought up in a hatless world. Why would hats be returning now? Most of the obvious obstacles have not gone away. Hatracks and hatchecks are gone, car roofs are still too low, and the commonly-available hats are of very poor quality.

I think it may be simply because now, in the new millenium and beyond, that huge shadow has passed, and we're just coming out of it. We no longer encounter "the greatest generation" in the course of our normal lives, and for the first time we can wear one of their emblems as perhaps a tribute to that generation, instead of fearing a face-to-face encounter with a "rightful owner". No one, anymore, is going to think that we're claiming to be something we're not by wearing it. Just at this point in history, that past has become just remote enough, for the first time, for the statement we're making by wearing a such a hat to be different.

A classic fedora is still and probably always will be associated with what we're calling "the golden age", but now our wearing it can be partly to honor that age and those men, whereas when those men actually shared our streets with us, it was, and maybe had to be, theirs alone.


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