According to Neil Steinbereg's Hatless Jack,
http://www.suntimes.com/output/books/sho-sunday-steinberg02.html
which I recently completed, the story about men's is more complicated. It's not WWII or Jack Kennedy. Steinberg cites evidence that hat-wearing was in decline from the teens through the sixties. There laments from hatters about the "fad" of going bareheaded among college students, schemes for hooking men on hats, the collapse of enforced hat-wearing, etc. Ns doesn'ta ctually have a theory as opposedto a collection of observations and facts, but thesea re amusing and entertaining and food for thought. It's really a puzzling issue in social history, since hats were required wear for a thousand years or more. Ties are probably next, along with business wear. (Disapproved at my law firm except for court.)
jks
--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>
> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> >
> > Thomas Seay entheogens at yahoo.com, Wed Feb 9
> 13:39:44 PST 2005:
> > >I see no advantage to dressing up like a 1920
> industrial worker
>
> 1. Cost 2. Less time dressing 3. Less time shopping
>
> (In the '20s I would guess industrial workers had
> their shirts ironed.
> The coming of perma press made a big difference. In
> the '50s, and I
> suppose the '60s, industrial workers wore sports
> shirts, not work
> shirts. Those of us who had khakis left over wore
> them.)
>
> >
> > What men of all classes, not just industrial
> workers, lost is hats.
> >
>
> Hats were victims of WW2 & the Korean War. Millions
> of men were forced
> to put on hats (many of them not too comfortable)
> every time they
> stepped outdoors for two to five years, and they
> came out of the service
> vowing never again. :-) I was one of them.
>
> Yoshie's source puts the divide in the 1960s, but
> hats were rapidly
> disappearing from the late '40s on. Before the war
> college men tended to
> wear hats; I don't remember a single hat-wearer at
> Western Michigan in
> the years I was there (1947-50). What made the
> difference, I think, was
> the influx of veterans. Hats went the way of
> freshman hazing.
>
> Carrol
>
> P.S. I once did see a Platonic Archetype walking. In
> the summer of '69
> driving to Des Moines we stopped at a restaurant
> along I80 in Iowa. And
> a couple (40s to 60s?) came in; he was wearing a
> pressed work shirt,
> pressed bib overalls; she was wearing a house dress
> right out of a
> Rockwell Kent painting.
>
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? All your favorites on one personal page – Try My Yahoo! http://my.yahoo.com