What men of all classes, not just industrial workers, lost is hats.
Frederick Engels, a surprisingly keen observer of fashion, noted: "Hats are the universal head-covering in England, even for working-men, hats of the most diverse forms, round, high, broad-brimmed, narrow- brimmed, or without brims -- only the younger men in factory towns wearing caps. Any one who does not own a hat folds himself a low, square paper cap" (Condition of the Working Class in England, 1845, <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch04.htm>).
Men kept their hats on until the 1960s:
<blockquote>Until the 1960s, the article of clothing that performed the most important role in indicating social distinctions among men was the hat. The fact that it ceased to fulfill this role in the 1960s suggests that in the nineteenth century, hats, which continued to be worn during the first half of the twentieth century, were particularly suitable for the social environment of the period. Several new types of hats appeared during the nineteenth century and were rapidly adopted at different social levels. Exactly what roles did hats perform? Because hats represented a more modest expense than jackets and coats, they provided an ideal opportunity for "blurring and transforming . . . traditional class boundaries" (Robinson 1993: 39). Men's hats were also used to claim and maintain, rather than to confuse, social status, as seen in the fact that specific types of hats became closely identified with particular social strata. Elaborate customs of "hat tipping" as a means of expressing deference to a man's superiors reflected the importance of the hat in marking class boundaries (McCannell 1973). Since men represented their families in public space, men's hats, rather than women's, were used to indicate the status of the family. Women's head coverings during this period were more varied and more individualized than men's (Wilcox 1945). Women's hats exemplified conspicuous consumption instead of relaying coded signals referring to social rank.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, hats were worn by members of all social classes, including the lowest strata. In a photograph taken in Paris around 1900 of a group of ragpickers, twenty out of twenty-three wear hats or caps. In the same period, photographs of workers leaving factories (Borgé and Viasnoff 1993: 113) and of workers' demonstrations in Boston (Robinson 1993: 6) show virtually everyone wearing a hat or a cap. (Diana Crane, Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing, <http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/117987.html>, 2000)</blockquote> -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>