[lbo-talk] Hats

[jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net]

> 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

Auto manufacturers were still picturing men wearing hats and mentioning room to wear a hat in 
sales brochures until the very early sixties. I don't recall having seen a post '63 automobile 
sales brochure with men pictured wearing hats, unless they were chauffeurs or wore hard hats, 
but in '58 almost all the men are portrayed wearing hats. After 1960 hatless men outnumbered 
men with hats in automobile advertising and sales brochures. Judged from this between '59 
and '62 hat use may have fallen off very steeply. 
Rightly or wrongly I tend to think that advertising and brochures of this kind, while they may not 
reflect the reality of society, do tend to reflect an idealized norm of sorts. Even if most men no 
longer wore hats in '59 the idea that a man "should" wear one seems to dominate advertising 
for year specific items like autos. In '61 it must have not been the ideal any longer as only a 
few men are pictured wearing hats and most are lidless.

John Thornton