The Fedora Loses To The Baseball Cap!

    When I think of the changes in the urban landscape over the past 5 or 6 decades, several absences come to mind: cigarettes, leather briefcases, paper maps. The most notable absence, however, is men’s hats — specifically, the famously cool…fedora. To be honest, I was reminded of this by the great essayist Joseph Epstein, and my grandfather. And let me be clear; I, personally, do not wear hats, unless I have just rolled out of bed and realize that there is no milk to go with my strawberry frosted Pop-Tarts, and I have to make a quick dash to the grocery store! Or, if it is raining. I mean, Pop-Tarts without my 2% milk! C’mon... Only then will I throw on a golf cap. To be perfectly honest, my head is much too large for a hat to look cool, like it does on many of my fellow golfers. But I digress...

    Defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as a “low, soft, felt hat with a curled brim and the crown creased length-ways,” the fedora was once a staple of men’s fashion, decades before Indiana Jones donned the look. Epstein reminds us that if the movies are any guide, the fedora had been the hat of choice for most men since at least the 1920s.

    Humphrey Bogart and Frank Sinatra helped cement the piece as an American classic well before 1950. The hall-of-fame novelist Saul Bellow preferred to be photographed wearing one. My grandfather, the heroic George DeLong, never left home without his fedora, even for an afternoon or early evening walk! A sport coat, vest and tie. Grampie was a dapper dresser, and all class. Nice restaurants had hat checks, tended by “hat-check girls”; other restaurants had hat stands near the tables to accommodate customers’ fedoras.

    Today one could go for months without seeing a man on the street wearing a fedora. No shortage, however, of grown men in baseball caps. This hat, whose origin is in a boys’ game, is now worn by men of all ages along with more than a few women. I can’t imagine Grampie in a baseball cap. And for some reason, men, especially young men, feel the need to wear their baseball caps indoors, even in fine dining establishments! Really? One of my favorite television scenes comes from The Sopranos, of course. Tony is in a favorite fine restaurant with a friend and he sees a kid with his cap on, accompanied by an attractive girlfriend, surrounded by people finely dressed all at their dining tables with fine linens and beautiful silverware. So, Tony walks over and tells him, “They don't sell hot dogs here...” The kid refuses. Tony just stares....and stares. You guessed it; the kid removes his hat; patrons smile; and Tony’s waiter brings over a fine bottle of wine...on the house! Great scene!

    So, where was I? Oh, yeah! Perhaps the first notable American to abandon the fedora was President John F. Kennedy. He never explained why he did so, but doubtless thought he looked better hatless. Every president since has followed his lead.

    What happened to the fedora, the male hat of choice for so many years? Well, fedoras require maintenance, which is to say occasional professional cleaning; they also need careful handling. Neither is true of baseball caps. Most of them, with an adjustment strap at the back, are one-size-fits-all, another convenience.

    The caps also allow people to sort themselves into tribes of favoritism. Many carry the logos of one of the Major Leagues’ 30 baseball teams. Others bear the names of the colleges the wearers or their children attended. President Trump uses baseball caps to advertise his own grandeur. The words “Make America Great Again” appear across his red baseball caps in big white letters; so, too, “Trump Was Right About Everything.” If he did not already deliver us there, he might have a cap that reads “Make America Crazy Now.”

    Again, even though I do not wear a fedora, although I am the perfect age for one, I believe something is lost with the disappearance of the fedora as the masculine headwear of choice. That something is a certain formality, adultness and seriousness that the fedora conferred on its wearer. The fedora marked a distinction between boyhood and manhood; the baseball cap renders all men ageless. So pervasive is the baseball cap currently in our culture, so continuous its spread, that I imagine one day walking into my old, childhood friend’s church in South Jersey, and seeing him up at the pulpit waiting to deliver the Sunday sermon while donning a Phillies or Eagles baseball cap. And damned if Pastor Sam isn’t wearing it turned backward! 

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com