Goodbye to the Porkpie: The Decline of American Hat Culture
John F. Kennedy showed up at his inauguration wearing a fedora. But sometime between his arrival at the Capitol and “ask what you can do for your country,” he left the hat by the wayside: a new-generation president discarding years of tradition and announcing a dark new day for American headgear. At least, that’s the simplistic answer for why American men stopped wearing hats. But like so much else about the Camelot myth, Kennedy’s influence on the decline of the fedora (and its younger sibling, the slightly smaller Trilby) is far overblown. The winds of change that swept the nation during the 1960s blew off plenty of hats in the process, and Kennedy had nothing to do with it.
The fedora and the Trilby revolutionized American style around the turn of the century, with nearly every man wearing one or the other by the 1920s. Photos from public gatherings in the first half of the century invariably show men clad in the gray or brown brimmed hats. Though men in hats were ubiquitous, the image of certain men in hats became the indelible images of the era. Frank Sinatra cocked his Trilby back at an angle; saxophonist Lester Young pulled his porkpie low; Al Capone’s ravenous eyes glared out from under his fedora. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who led the Manhattan Project, became so identified with his porkpie that when Physics Today put him on its cover in 1948 they simply used a photograph of his hat resting on a pressure valve.
But even beyond gangsters and musicians, few men would leave their homes with their heads uncovered. The prevailing style of the era dictated formality, and no man was ever fully dressed without a jacket, a tie, and a hat. Even in the depths of the Great Depression this uniform prevailed. Historian Robert Caro recounts how chronically unemployed men in the Depression dug ditches for the Civil Works Administration, breaking their backs through New York winters. They wore the only clothes they owned: suits and hats. Caro describes the sight of the men as both comical and profoundly heart wrenching; the suits and hats represented a dwindling hope for dignified work that was nowhere to be found.
Following the war, returning doughboys exchanged their helmets for fedoras. Many American cities in the 1950s reached their all-time population peaks while the roaring US export economy supported millions of industrial jobs in urban areas. But automobile purchases also soared during the ‘50s, and the construction of interstate highways and the passage of suburb-friendly federal housing policies began a marked change for inner cities. Commuting to work became increasingly commonplace.
Though popular images of the time would seem to suggest otherwise, the ‘50s car boom signaled the coming decline of American hat culture. Men wore hats on their way to work largely because they were outdoors (walking or taking mass transit) and in public. They didn’t need to wear hats in self-contained automobiles. And if they neglected to don a Trilby in the morning, they were unlikely to wear one later in the day, either.
The counter-culture of the 1960s finished what car culture had started. Vietnam made short hair a symbol of the militaristic American establishment, so innumerable young men chose to let their free flags fly. The sullen upper-echelon of Washington continued to wear hats, and the young men at risk of being sent to their deaths had no interest in mimicking the establishment’s sense of style. (Ironically, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, one of the chief architects of the Vietnam quagmire, had also been a top executive at the Ford Motor Company- so forget Kennedy; McNamara clearly wanted to kill the hat.)
Beyond the war, the eruption of ethnic pride in the late ‘60s further splintered American popular style. Groups like the Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam had their own sense of style, wearing black berets and bowties as their respective trademarks. Hair became a powerful symbol of self-expression as well, and few have ever managed to wear a fedora over an Afro. The brimmed hat had become a symbol of white patriarchy, and its rejection became inevitable.
By the 1970s, the fedora and its cousins had gone into deep hibernation. In recent years they have begun to reemerge, largely due to the popularity of gangster movies and the importance of irony in hipster culture. Like the mustache and coke-bottle glasses, hipsters can’t seem to resist using a former symbol of the white cultural hegemony to show their individuality. Yet the hat won’t return to its perch atop the collective heads of American men- car culture is too entrenched- and the slide toward informality since the end of the 1950s has only continued to progress. The fedora died in the ‘60s. Just don’t give Kennedy the credit.