Up In Smoke

A few weeks back, the Guardian newspaper in its “Notes and Queries” section queried, “When and why did men stop wearing hats?”* Five-hundred-and-forty-six reader responses later, the questions remained unresolved. Did the decline begin in the ‘50s? Or was it the ‘60s? Were older men still clinging to their headgear in the ‘80s? Was the cause of the decline President Kennedy, who was seldom seen with a hat? Or was it the increase in car ownership—hats being a challenge to wear in one? Or a fashion change in hair styles, which didn’t accommodate a hat?

Or maybe it just should be acknowledged that men still wear headgear, only now it’s the ubiquitous baseball cap?

At any rate, as noted above, the result of the debate was a standoff. 

Personally, I liked wearing a hat, especially my boater in summer. I wonder what happened to it?

And as a side issue, why did hatters suddenly start advertising bowlers in 1959? 

It is hat advertising that I will use to attempt to answer to the questions posed in the Guardian; when that disappeared from The New Yorker, I think that was the sign of the demise of the hat.

Stay tuned.

*

I am in my second round of going through the archives of The New Yorker. Having started this time around in 1940, I am now up to 1960. While thinking about men’s hats, I have also been noticing women’s hats. (Next question: When did women stop wearing hats?) Unlike men, it seemed that women never took off their hats. There they are in a restaurant or a club meeting with their lids on. 

And why did women have veils on their hats? What was that all about? Today, it seems that the only women wearing hats are the Queen of England, who looks so good in them, and dipsy dames at the Kentucky Derby in hats with wingspans out to here.

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As L. P. Hartley famously wrote in his novel The Go-Between, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” the hat-wearing country of the past is different from today. Different, too, as I learned from my archives trawling, was the constant depiction of men with pipes. Cartoonists hardly showed a domestic scene without the pater familias having a briar clenched between his teeth. Men at meetings, on trains or planes, on the street, anywhere at all, they all had a pipe in mouth or hand. Advertisers hawking raincoats or sporting goods as well had their models piped.  

Looking back at the ‘50s and ‘60s, I have recollection of only a handful of pipe smokers—a drafting teacher, for one, whose pungent tobacco is a smell that still lingers in my nasal passages. I can only wonder how all those smokers stayed out of my ken.

I suppose something about the idea of the pipe smoker appealed to those admen and cartoonists. You know: that they were deliberate, stoic, deep thinkers, not prone to rashness or precipitate acts. After all, pipe smoking involved a whole michagas: you took a pouch of tobacco out of your pocket; you placed a pinch into the pipe; you tamped the tobacco down; you lit a match and applied it to the pipe; you took several puffs to get the fire started (it never started at once). Then you leaned back in your chair and proclaimed, “In my considered judgment . . . .”

The banning of tobacco advertisements and depiction in the media has meant the disappearance of pipe smokers from our lives. Cigarette smokers still can be found loitering outside the doorways of their workplaces. But pipe smokers, what place for them?

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* https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/aug/24/when-and-why-did-men-stop-wearing-hats