I could go into some diatribe about the music of the 80s but I shall leave that for someone that is a fan.
I will close out my week with a little cultural history.
For generations upon generations men wore hats…..top hats. derby, cowboy, bowler, etc…..as late as the 1040s and 50s hats were still being part of the attire and then in the 1960s something happened….but why did it happen?
It was everywhere. Men, women, and even children did it every time they left the house. If you see old newsreel footage of men in the office or on commuter trains from the advent of the motion picture camera to the early ‘60s, nearly everyone is wearing a hat. Hats were just as common for women in that era. For a woman to go out without a hat in the first half of the 20th century was akin to going out without clothes.
The funny thing is that everyone’s headgear is so similar in the old-timey footage that it makes previous generations look like big-time conformists. Then, in the early ‘60s, everything changed, and men and women started to go out in public with their hair exposed. Why did such a big aspect of fashion seem to change overnight?
Warmbru Curiosity investigated the question recently in a popular YouTube video. Warmbru’s channel is a lighthearted look at some of the more unusual people and events from our history and how they have influenced the world in which we live.
Warmbru says fashion changed dramatically after World War II, when people in developed countries began to care less about expressing their social status. “This was especially true among the younger generation the rise of youth culture in the 1950s and 1960s emphasized rebellion against traditional norms, including formal dress codes,” the YouTuber says.
Another big reason for the change in fashion was technology. Cars became the preferred mode of transportation for many after World War II and indoor environments became more hospitable. “People spent far less time exposed to the elements as people increasingly moved to urban areas and started using cars,” Warmbru says. “The practicality of wearing hats diminishes. Hats can be cumbersome in cars and on public transport, improvements in heating and air conditioning reduce the need for hats to provide warmth.”
Warmbru adds that President John F. Kennedy, elected in 1960, rarely wore a hat and his decision to go bareheaded became associated with modernity. Further, in 1963, the mop-topped Beatles proudly flaunted their hatless heads as they shook them while singing, “Wooooo.” Hat-wearing among women began to decline around the same time as the restrictive and complex headgear clashed with the burgeoning women’s liberation movement.
A hundred years ago, everyone wore hats. In 1960, they suddenly stopped. Here’s why.
There you have it a change in cultural perception.
Although those cowboy hats are still popular with some (that reason will be beyond me)….
I hope this change in pace was to your satisfaction.
A little history is always a good thing.
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
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I think social status was something to do with it. Good hats were expensive, and women were expected to have a variety of hats to suit certain occasions. That was replaced by what car you drove, what watch you wore, and having hairstyles, both men and women, that were unsitable for hats. But then the baseball cap came along, and everyone seems to wear one of those now, even the president of the USA. (I don’t own one, but I do have a summer lightweight hat, panama-style, to wear on very hot days.)
Best wishes, Pete.
Those are good points Pete….I wear more caps than hats……chuq
I read a lot of publications from the early part of the 20th century and the late 19th and it surprised me to see that just about everyone in the old photos was wearing a hat of some type or other. And I really don’t believe that the reason why was changes in modern technology like automobiles or indoor environments becoming more comfortable. Automobiles were new, true, but they had nothing to do with it. After all we had enclosed horse drawn carriages for hundreds of years before autos came along and wearing a hat in one of those was just as inconvenient as it would be in a car. Nor does more pleasant indoor environments have anything to do with it because we’ve also had pleasant indoor environments for centuries as well. And generally speaking men rarely wore hats while indoors anyway.
I think it was simply that they went out of fashion.
BTW, the “cowboy” hat as we think of it today is almost completely an invention of the media. If you look at old photos of actual real cowboys they wore just about anything they could get their hands on, derbies, slouch caps, anything that would keep their heads warm. Most cowboys, the real ones, wouldn’t have been able to afford one of those in the first place. Much of what we think we know about the “Wild West” is complete fiction made up out of whole cloth by first the dime novels of the late 19th century and then later the movie industry. Same with gun fights. The image of two men facing each other to see who could “slap leather” the fastest is complete BS. It never happened. Shootings did occur, but in a much less honorable fashion, usually a shotgun blast in the back while walking down an alley.
The whole fascination with ‘cowboys’ is all about lies….besides I want two cowboy hats….so I can shit in one and cover it with the other….chuq
Lies is an understatement. A lot of these “wild” west towns like Dodge City, Deadwood, etc. that are now associated with gun fights and all that BS actually had outright bans on carrying firearms entirely. Nor did cowboys normally carry pistols when they were out on the range. Shotguns and short rifles yes, pistols? No. Most ranchers strictly prohibited hired hands from carrying pistols anyway for obvious reasons. The pistols that were commonly available at the time were generally wildly inaccurate at ranges of more than a few feet, unreliable and as Mark Twain observed, often more dangerous to innocent bystanders than they were to the intended target. A rifle or shotgun would have been far more useful for hunting or defending against bears or wildcats and the like.
GF I cannot understand the fascination around the world with a lie like cowboys….chuq