I love silly hats!!

I've always thrived on being a fashion contrarian. As a kid, the school dress code was my greatest enemy. Some of the rules had obvious (though flawed & misogynistic) reasoning but the rule that I could never wrap my head around was “no hats”. Teachers who didn't even have me as a student would stop me in the halls asking me to take off my beret, or tiara, or feathered fascinators (yes all things I wore to middle school) - I grew increasingly frustrated at their changing definitions of a “hat”. My girl-scout bandana worn rosie-the-riveter style? could be gang related. My mini top hat? too distracting.

I really believe my love of hats was born from them being banned and as a fan of fashion history I learned that for most of time before this, they were almost mandatory. Head coverings have been a staple of fashion since we started wearing clothes yet, nowadays I'm the weird one for wearing hats? As far back as the Copper age, hats were an outfit staple. Ötzi the iceman was found in 1991 preserved in ice, with his whole outfit pretty intact. He sported a bearskin hat with a little chin strap.

Hats can be very practical, they protect the head, which I’ve heard is pretty important. It makes sense that they date so far back.

So what happened? Generally hats started going out of fashion around the 60s/70s. Sometimes it's suggested that JFK killed the hat for men, when he opted to go without one for his inauguration. Sure it's a nice and neat story to say a president brought on this new age but it's not true.

JFK actually did wear a hat, it was a top hat as per an old presidential tradition. He just took it off to address the crowd, which Eisenhower, Truman and Roosevelt had all done before him. and if we are talking about Kennedys and hats, we cannot forget Jackie and her pillbox! JFK didn't kill mens hats, but Jackie revived women's for a brief moment.

Besides the general practicality of hats no longer being as needed with the increasing prevalence of cars rather than walking/public transport; the 60s/70s were also a time when women's hairstyles were going through a lot of changing trends. The 60s gave us beehives and bouffants, voluminous styles that couldn't be paired with a hat. Now of course this was also the civil rights era, so a lot of these new trends in hair were based in straight hair. Going into the 70s this continued, when long straight flowing hippie hair a la the brady bunch became all the rage. It doesn't feel like a coincidence that as black people started to gain more rights and equality, at the same time it became fashionable to show more of your (straight) hair then ever before. And this only continued as the 80s gave us more big hair that couldn't be tamed by a hat and the 90s gave us spikey gel-ed styles that again, showed off straight hair. Now I do not think hats are necessarily the answer to killing white- supremacist beauty trends, I just think that the timing of their demise in culture answers why it was always white conservative adults getting angry at my hats, even today.

However, I feel a change in the wind. I see more hats on the red carpet, in editorials. Chappell Roan is almost never seen without a head piece. Anya Taylor Joy is known to love a hat. With this years Met Gala theme being “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” I'm sure we’ll see plenty of top hats, fedoras, etc. I don't think hats will ever be as much of a staple as they were pre 1950s but luckily that doesn't fucking matter! You don't have to wait for something to “be back” to wear it. Wear your silly hats today! Go find vintage pillbox hats on ebay, stick a feather in your hair, wear a old fashion bonnet! Hats are just so much fun, fuck anyone who can't get with it.

Now please enjoy some of my favorite silly hats, and hat-wearing icons below :)