The Beanie

Today on the hebephrenic hatter we’re moving away from the hats your grandfather wore, away from styles of the unrepentant bourgeoisie, and away from the headwear of the capitalist moonshine community of yore.  No!  Ladies and gentlemen today we need a blue collar hat.  We need the kind of hat you’d want when you’re bivouacked on the edge of the desert with a hole in your radiator, and your thinking about getting into that psychotropic looking fungus that hitch hiker gave you thirty miles back.  You know the stuff; that indistinguishable powder ominously lurking in your glove box.

I see it now.  You’re on the edge of the desert, and it’s getting cold people (not to mention the fact that colors are getting brighter and your inhibition has gone out the window with that cup of water you so desperately need now).  So what’s the hat you reach for to get you through that cold, cold night?  Of course, it’s the beanie!

While the origins of the beanie are unknown and somewhat ambiguous, according to the Wikipedia sphere, a variation of the skullcap (i.e. the beanie) became popular a long time ago among blue collar workers.[1]  Welders, mechanics, and the like used the beanie as a form of hair net to keep those lushes locks out of the way while working with heavy machinery.  Despite its functional use, the beanie had a falling out in the 1940’s due to the fact that a derivative of the beanie started to gain popularity.  That derivative is known today as the baseball cap.  However, the beanie remained strong, and in the fifties it was used to haze college freshmen, and the rest is history folks.  The beanie gained popularity amongst the American youth for years to come.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beanie_(North_America)

http://digitalbrandgroup.hubpages.com/hub/Beanie_history

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[1] As stated earlier the beanie originated as a variation of the skullcap at an unspecified date, but the origins of the hat could probably be traced back to the early 20^th century.

The Fedora

When looking into the growing trends in the head wear community, I’ve often found myself coming back to the ever popular fedora, and today we will be featuring Brixton’s own wool made, Jones style, wide brim, silk lined, teardrop shaped fedora with the temple indents. This type of fedora is made for special occasions, such as meeting with your therapist about your debilitating hat obsession or other hat related emergencies. Brixton makes, without exception, bar none the most well crafted fedoras I can afford, and, sentiment aside, the fedora I’m examining deserves intense review.

So I reached out to my family for their opinions on my hat, and the following is what ensued: “Hey what do you think of my hat?”

“Get out of my room! Fedoras are a girl’s hat.” Actually my sister might not be that far from the truth. The word fedora was coined by dramatist and playwright Victorien Sardou in his 1882 play “Fedora” which featured a female lead named, you guessed it, Fedora. She was featured in the play wearing a hat fashioned to look like today’s fedora, and, coincidentally, after the played gained popularity the fedora became a staple for women’s fashion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but I am a man I needed to get to the bottom of how the fedora became a men’s fashion statement.

So I asked my mother: “What do you think of my hat?”

“It reminds me of the hat my grandpa used to wear.” She might be on to something. The fedora quickly became popular for men as well, and in the early twenties it achieved mainstream notoriety for its gangster connotations. In fact, Al Capone was known to wear a fedora, and the film industry adopted this fashion for the archetypal gangster mystique in the fifties, but, gangsters aside, even orthodox Jews were and are known to wear black fedoras. So, fedoras have a rich history indeed. For more information about the fedora check out the following websites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora
http://www.ehow.com/about_5041049_history-fedora-hats.html