Like most fashion enthusiasts, last year I was eagerly following the looks from the Karl Lagerfeld Met Gala. There were many eye-catching and elegant outfits, however there was one that has stuck with me ever since: Dua Lipa in Karl Lagerfeld’s 1992 Chanel bride dress, which is made out of a textured cream colored fabric with silver and black tubing accents and a white fringe hem. The dress is classically beautiful and Dua Lipa looks gorgeous in it, yet when I saw the original outfit worn by Claudia Schiffer the 1992 show I couldn’t help but notice that Dua Lipa was not wearing the original top hat! It may be an innocuous detail for most, but I kept thinking about why her stylist didn’t include it. As a result, this question has been lingering in my mind ever since: why do we no longer wear hats?

Of course people today wear hats. There’s sun hats, baseball caps, beanies, cowboy hats, the list goes on. But when you look at old photos of crowds or just people out and about, everyone is wearing a hat. In fact in the early 1900s it would have been shameful to leave the house without one. Now, hats are optional accessories. People wear wide brimmed hats to shade themselves on the beach, knitted hats during winter to keep warm, or beanies to signify to the ladies that you’re not like other guys. But, the average person no longer has an everyday hat or a formal hat. So how did we go from hats being a signifier of wealth and class to being frowned upon within formal life in under a century?

To answer this question we have to first look back in history. The late 19th century to the first decade of the 20th century was when the popularity of the hat reached its peak. During this time women decorated their wide-brimmed hats extravagantly to signify how fashionable they were. Men also had to wear a hat to be seen as dignified in society. However, lavish hats did not last long and with the material restrictions that were put in place during WW1, women started to experiment more with the shape and form of hats instead of adding excessive embellishments. 

At the time there were two types of hatmakers: hatters and milliners. Hatters were usually men that made hats out of felt to be worn mostly by men. Milliners were women that made hats out of fabric and straw-like materials. These hats were then embellished to fit the latest trend for women to wear. At the time, millinery was one of the few ways women could independently make money. However by the 1920’s, fashion had changed as women were now wearing minimally-embellished felt cloche hats that fit snugly to the head, a great contrast from the widebrims of the 1900s. As a result, women began to buy their hats from hatters causing women milliners, and their businesses, to take a hit. 

Although millinery was negatively impacted by the trends of the 20’s, hats were still required for much of life. When the 1930s and 40s rolled around, women’s hats became even more decorated again. Even though in some ways this could be perceived as going back to “business as usual” it is undeniable that there was a major shift in the culture surrounding hats. At the turn of the 20th century everyone from the youngest schoolgirl to the oldest grandpa wore a hat out of the house. Nevertheless by the 1930’s, most teenagers did not wear hats. While fashionable older women and men were wearing hats, the new generation was not.  

The end of the 1960s arguably marked the end of hats and their status within formal life. Not only were women wearing big beehive hairstyles that could not accommodate a hat, big influences in fashion slowly stopped wearing hats, Jackie Kennedy being one of the most notable. Jackie Kennedy famously did not like wearing hats, and when she had to, she wore a small pillbox hat that was barely noticeable from the front. Other factors that likely contributed to the fall of the hat are the increased reliance on cars, whose ceilings don’t accommodate large hats, and the popularization of sunglasses, that don’t always fit with hats.

Despite the many factors, like Jackie Kennedy, cars, and sunglasses, I think the biggest factor that paved the way for the hat’s downfall in popular culture was the shift towards youth and leisure in fashion. By the late 1960’s, the youth were the drivers of fashion as every relevant designer at the time wanted to cater to them. The youth were more experimental and care-free as they were not wearing their mother’s pillbox or their father’s fedora. With the shift towards youth also came the shift towards casual dressing, which has only accelerated with the 2010’s athleisure trend. Now people wear hats only in specialty situations or in casual moments. I mean, just imagine how you’d react if you saw some CEO walking around their office in a hat. 

Another cultural shift that has revolutionized the way we wear clothes is the popularization of ready-to-wear clothing. In the early 20th century nearly all of the hats worn by people everyday were handmade. However, today people buy their hats from fast fashion brands or department stores and consumers are no longer willing to pay handmade bespoke prices for everyday items. Because the hats of the past were hand embellished that meant that only the richest could keep up with the cutting-edge trends. This meant that you could tell someone’s class merely by their hat. Today, with fast-fashion anyone can look rich, if only from a distance, so people don’t need the newest style of hat to improve their station in society. In fact, not following trends has now become a symbol of affluence. 

All of this complicates the hat’s situation in today’s world. Women no longer dress in floor length skirts to run errands and men only don suits in the most formal occasions, so why would we wear the hats that went with them? Despite the fact that humans have a habit declaring that they’ll never wear a certain outdated trend ever again, fashion is nothing if not cyclical. So it makes sense that something as common as hats would become popular again. With hats, what we have lost in ubiquity we have gained in creativity and distinction. Because not everyone is wearing the same felt hat everyday, what hat someone chooses to wear can tell you a lot about them. Wearing a beret signals you are artsy and cultured, wearing a beanie shows you like to follow trends, and wearing a fedora easily acts like birth control. Not to mention the reaction you’ll get if you wear a certain red baseball cap. 

In a world where it feels like everything has been done before, hats are still a new frontier. Putting on the right hat is an easy way to signal your membership of a group or your individuality. Hats have an additional bonus of being relatively cheap in comparison to other items of clothing. With everything becoming so expensive, hats could become an attainable way for the average person to switch up their style. Hats can make you look more distinguished or more casual. They can tone down an eccentric outfit or make you stand out even more. With hats the possibilities are endless and it’s time we bring them back!

Reach writer Helen Burt at musemediauw@gmail.com.
Instagram @helen_b.b