Sometimes these clothing fashions have waves, cycles, ups and downs, sin curves. Kroeber the famous anthropologist did a study of women's hemlines going up and down in fashion. In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking.
Kroeber, A. L. and J. Richardson. "Three Centuries of Women's Dress Fashion: A Quantitative Analysis." Anthropological Records, 5, no. 2 (1947): 111-153.
In the long wave, hats might come back. But what causes the movement and what does it "mean" ?
Also, Marshall Sahlins has a structural analysis of American clothing cultural categories in _Culture and Practical Reason_
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976) (pp. 166 - 181) Chapter 4 La Pensee Bourgeoise: Western Society as Culture
http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/hist100.96/sahlins.html
>Block quote>
Notes on the American Clothing System
Considered as a whole, the system of American clothing amounts to a very complex scheme of cultural categories and the relations between them, a veritable map -- it does not exaggerate to say -- of the cultural universe.'" The first task will be to suggest that the scheme operates on a kind of general syntax: a set of rules for declining and combining classes of the clothing-form so as to formulate the cultural categories. In a study of mode as advertised in several French magazines, Roland Barthes discriminated for women's dress alone some sixty foci of sign)fication. Each site or climension comprised a range of meaningful contrasts: some by mere presence or absence, as of gloves; some as diversified as the indefinite series of colors (Barthes 1967, pp. 114 ff ) It is evident that with a proper syntax, rules of combination, a formidable series of propositions could be developed, constituting so many statements of the relations between persons and situations in the cultural system. It is equally evident that I could not hope to do more than suggest the presence of this grammar, without pretense at having analyzed it. <end block quote>
CB:Many industrial workers in the U.S. in the twenties wore the cap form of hat or headwear. Baseball caps and skull caps are very widespread among inner city and industrial working class guys today.Playa , playa ! :.)
The adoption of the baseball specific sporty look suggests attention to the symbolism of baseball in U.S. culture.
We might begin ,as Sahlins does (in a section not quoted in above reference), with the binary opposition work/play. Activity at an auto plant is work. Playing baseball is play. Now a mass fashion is for workers to wear players' caps. Afterall, baseball players play for money. They got it made.
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Yoshie Furuhashi:
Thomas Seay:
>I see no advantage to dressing up like a 1920 industrial worker
What men of all classes, not just industrial workers, lost is hats.