It's always a good time to bash Simon Heffer. Like Heffer, I do think that the hat should make a comeback. However it is simply untrue to say that President Kennedy was responsible for the decline of hat wearing. Usually this myth states that the decline in hat wearing began when he declined to wear the traditional top hat during in inauguration, and being such a style icon he immediately made head wear obsolete.
The one slight flaw in the theory is that during his inauguration he had a great big hat shaped item on his soon to be splattered bonce.
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5 comments:
No hats possibly derived from :
1. a reaction to military 'hats' from ww2
2, Men started to get pretty and so had hair styles.
Did he? I've Googled JFK, inauguration, images, and I can't see a hat on his head.
Malpas- I can;t see why a reactio to hats would have been more intense after the second World War than the first.
Mark- look up Snopes, they have plenty of images of Eisenhower with JFK both wearing hats.
I always put it down to the growth of private motoring - hats became redundant as weather protection.
The lack of headroom in more compact models of car has probably been a disincentive too - you have to keep taking the hat off when you get into the car.
That does make sense. I bet there is a correlation between hat wearing and car driving.
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