Baseball Caps and Beanies

It’s a funny thing, this hat business. Men wearing hats, that is. According to Susie Hopkins on the Lovetoknow website, men’s hats are divided into three categories – Protection, Status and Vanity.

Being a cyclist, I can understand protection. Actually, being one who also has a wood burning cooker (and can be seen preparing the wood for burning, by way of a chainsaw and axe), I can understand, in this context protection for the head and the face. In fact, I can think of many situations (and I’m sure you can think of more) where protecting one’s cranium, takes priority. All the same, protection can take many forms. Take the humble sun hat for instance. It’s comes in many different shapes and sizes, but it’s function is to protect us from the burning heat of the sun.

On the subject of the sun hat, this can lead to various levels of vanity. There’s the Kiss-me-quick, seaside sun hat, the bowling green Panama, the swinger’s Porkpie and the explorer’s Tilly. Each carries a certain vanity for the wearer – it says something about them.

The Bee Suit - Fetching eh?

My favourite hat is one that removes all sense of vanity when wearing it (well that's the impression wiflette leaves me with). It’s attached to my bee suit and embraces all three of Susie Hopkins’ categories: It protects me from the bees, when I’m working the hive; It gives a sense of status – ‘Oooh. He’s a bee keeper’ and; it fulfils my vanity needs by sending out signals that I’m dicing with ‘dangerous nature’ (at least that what I think the signals are saying).

Which of course suggests a discussion on the measure of status. Cycle helmets do this. One could be wearing a Bell, a Lazer, a Giro (always thought that was my pension cheque), or a Kask (isn’t that for whiskey?) or mine, which is an ALDI special, and all these demonstrate to other cyclists a measure of status. You can see each of us eyeing one another up as we compare brands.

Back in the day, men used to wear hats to identify with a community (gangsters would wear trilbies, miners would wear flat caps, Headmasters would wear mortar boards). But times change – or do they?

If one observes closely, one can see men are still wearing hats – such as baseball caps and beanies – and still using them to identify with a community. In the 1940s, hats were de rigueur. These days we just wear them because we want to... don't we?