How do folks react to your hat wearing?

[fashion frank]

Man Oh Man !

Here´s a bit of half serious stylish fun, me in my casual horse riding attire on my stallion:

Here my best suit, chamois breeches, brocade jacket/vest, satin shirt etc.

and ofcourse several in between

I can fill an hilarious booklet with how folk respond

You my good friend are simply THE BOMB ,I love it do your own thing thats what its all about !

Paul Revere must be rolloing over in his grave !

You are just to much keep it up .

All the Best ,Fashion Frank

P. S. And I thought I had balls !

 

[Spats McGee]

I wear my hats because I like them. What other folks think of my attire really isn't any of my concern. That said, I've never had a negative remark about my hats.

 

[GHT]

Here´s a bit of half serious stylish fun, me in my casual horse riding attire on my stallion:
I can fill an hilarious booklet with how folk respond

I have to echo Frank's remarks, you look absolutely incredible. Fabulous.

 

[Crazy Dave]

I have to echo Frank's remarks, you look absolutely incredible. Fabulous.

I agree, and many thanks for bringing back childhood memories of watching Dick Turpin on TV.

 

[Huertecilla]

Thanks guys, you make me blush....

To round it off:

Me bringing eggs to a customer on a cccold morning

ditto late night

and giving class

 

[Edward]

"If only what?" I encouraged. adding, "if only my friends wouldn't mock me." I went on, "you two only do and dress as part of your group. It's called: Herd instinct. You don't want to stand out." The reply almost shocked me. "Man, how did you know?" Because I was young once you silly arse," I thought, but didn't say. The youth went on: "Where do you get shoes like that?" "Are you serious?" I replied. "No," he answered, honestly. "But like you said:If only my pals didn't take the p*ss out of me." "You'll get there," I said, smiling, as I got into my car, and drove off. Another convert.

It's a sharp look. You're bang on re herd instinct.... odly, it seems to only have increased these days. Tribalism is something I can well understand. When I was younger, you were a punk or a goth or a grunger or whatever, part of a tribe, common interests, tastes, values - the tribal dressing was an emphasis of that. For those of us in various subcultures, it was both a statement of belonging to our own tribe, and also very strongly one of rejection of "the norm". These days, I'm not sure (aside from rare exceptions and the hipster thing) that many kids, at least hre in the UK, are into an identifiable subculture thing to anything like the extent there used to be. Maybe with the emphasis on online interaction now, there isn't the same notion of one's 'look' being as important as it used to be, or maybe the disposability of fashion now means kids can afford not to commit to any one specific thing, I don't know. There does, however, sadly seem to be a much greater degree of conformity to an anonymous norm than was the case in my day. I'm not saying for a minute that the herd mentality didn't exist within our various subcultures, but at the same time if you had the testicular fortitude to stick out with your look in Belfast, somehow it seemed that much less likely that you wouldn't experiment here and there...

 

[MothPrey]

This is a very complex subject- I could probably write a book. There are a LOT of factors at work.

I've gone through several periods of hat-wearing, and lapsed several times. Yes, I've gotten negative remarks. And stares. And laughter. "Nice hat" and "Cool hat, dude" dripping with sarcasm, and people whistling the Indiana Jones theme as I pass in the lobby. It's absolutely true that at least 99 percent of folks don't care... but if, as I do, you might pass a few hundred people a day, those odds are not working for you. My trip to and from work involves a drive, a long subway ride with exposure to different stations and platforms, and a walk through the heart of the city. I get seen by a LOT of people. I've had friends who revel in having an entire Starbucks or whatever go quiet when they walk in- I've just never been that way. I can "bull" my way through it, but I don't really enjoy being a spectacle.

You can wear an ersatz-Peruvian Indian knit cap in any color combination found in a candy store, with dangling ear-flaps and tassels that approach your waist, and no one will pay any attention, but if you wear a real hat, especially a felt of any kind with a brim more than two inches, people stare and even openly avoid you. There is also no "safe zone" between the "Indiana Jones" comments and the "cowboy" remarks, instead they overlap- you can get both on the same day wearing the same thing.

It may be a factor that I seldom wear a suit. Where I'm working the standard is "business casual" (dress shirt, slacks) with casual Fridays, and even I have trouble pairing a felt hat (at least a new-looking felt hat) with polo shirts and cargo pants on the East Coast. IMHO most fedoras (at least, new-looking fedoras) are just inherently too formal looking to pair well with very casual clothes, at least when viewed from a 21st-century perspective. I'm not that averse to suits, I wore a suit and tie to work every day for something like eleven years, but the field I work in (computer software) is traditionally very casual, and if you show up in a suit you are NOT taken seriously as a hard-core technical thinker, you are associated with marketers or management who do not generally understand deep technical issues.. the older I get the more true this is. I've had entire technical teams I've worked with put off by one appearance in a suit (for a meeting with a client), and they talked about it for years afterwards.

This area is famously also almost unique in its anti-fashion, anti-novelty culture. For decades it seemed that the greater proportion of women took perverse pride in dressing as unattractively as possible in the workplace, as though to prove that they could succeed without it, but there's an even deeper current than that. Dressing for weather is not "cool" to these people, and a lot of them go to great lengths to avoid it. Year in, year out, I see people with no hats and no umbrellas, not infrequently with no coat or jacket of any kind, out walking their dogs, soaked to the skin, when it's been raining for hours or day- they were not caught by surprise. I had a boss once, younger guy, who not only refused to wear a coat regardless of the weather but refused to have one in his car, and often said with pride "I never let the weather affect my actions". I've been ridiculed for tossing a parka, boots and a sleeping bag into the back of my vehicle in the depth of winter "just in case", and my attempts to present my reasoning met with anger. I've seen young men in jeans and t-shirts out in single-digit temperatures, dancing around frantically trying to survive the cold but apparently never giving a thought to dressing for it. I recently saw a guy in my neighborhood wearing a thick jacket but bare-headed and wearing nothing but thin nylon surfer shorts walking through the snow. There's this unspoken but very cultivated attitude here, I think of it as "ostentatious helplessness", and the people who practice it can be.. are.. very defensive and hostile to other points of view. They tend to view hat-wearing as an open challenge to their values.

I also, just last week, had a young woman at work ask "Aren't you afraid people will think you're sexist?". It never occurred to me, and I haven't even begun to look into that issue.

In the worst of this winter weather, looking at the men waiting for the subway on platforms, even the portions of the platforms not sheltered under a roof, I see perhaps one man out of five wearing any sort of hat or cap, and less than one out of twenty wearing any hat with a brim, and one out of some hundreds wearing a non-stingy-brim felt hat. This whole winter, I've seen perhaps three besides myself- and we had snow here yesterday on March 30th, it's been a very long winter.

I generally prefer to wear a hat, but resistance to it is so constant here that it just wears you down after a while. It's seductively easy to just to "forget" once, twice, a few times, and suddenly the habit is gone. I tend to return to it in bad weather, or in a year or two, and my bouts of hat-wearing seem to get longer the older I get, but most men who try it in this area obviously give up pretty quickly.

 

[Huertecilla]

I also, just last week, had a young woman at work ask "Aren't you afraid people will think you're sexist?". It never occurred to me, and I haven't even begun to look into that issue.

HER pov is sexist, prejudiced and discriminatory actually.

What you are describing seems to me the dictatorship of the mindless mayority steered by demagogy.

 

[Florida_Marlin]

I've been wearing hats a long time. It's been quite a while since I've gotten a negative hat comment...I can't even remember. When I am occasionally discovered without a hat, I usually get a comment. " Where's your hat?" F_M

 

[hatguy1]

I wear my hats because I like them. What other folks think of my attire really isn't any of my concern. That said, I've never had a negative remark about my hats.

+1


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[bowlerman]

Interesting read, MothPrey. Thank you for sharing your thoughts, and welcome to the lounge.

I have most definitely received negative comments, but usually by drunk college kids or meatheads on testosterone overload, and almost always from a car, in groups, and I'm pretty sure they're just invigorated from being youthful, and don't fault them for their silly reactions.

It is nice to think "I don't care what others think" but in all honesty nobody feels good being insulted. So I try to live more by "I won't change to accommodate others' opinions." You know if it came down to it, in a dark alley with someone holding me at gunpoint saying "that's a stupid hat. remove it or else..." I'd give up the hat, dudes.

Lately I have received a lot of positive comments in public. Yesterday a man complimented my Pantropic and said he couldn't wait until summer so he could break out his Panama.

A few weeks ago I met a younger fellow at a bar who, by all standard classifications, would call himself a hippie. I was wearing my Tumwater fedora. He made a B line to come over and tell me how much he liked hats, and that he wore them too. Frankly, I enjoyed his naive enthusiasm as he told me he liked to roll the brims on his hats, "more like a hippie, instead of like the cowboy hat style, like you're wearing." There was no reason to "correct" him. Why restrict his enthusiasm?

Usually ladies around here--even the classy ones-- are less than impressed by headwear. Most will just keep it to themselves if they don't enjoy my hats, quietly judging. Doesn't matter anyway, since I'm married.

However, I did get a genuine "hey nice hat!" from an incredibly attractive woman, who turned out to be from California. I'm starting to key into the traditions of South Dakota cultural values, having been here for over a decade now, and they are very practical folks. The very thought of wearing a hat without having a real necessity for it doesn't seem to sit well with the old-schoolers, forget about having more than one! Even some very wealthy people live in humility and feel that anything that isn't an absolute necessity is in excess, and won't tolerate it. Of course there are people who lie at other various points of that spectrum.

Recently I was informed that my orchestra students talk about how cool my hats are when I'm not around. Ok, that feels like bragging, but it just tickled me pink to hear it.

Yesterday a colleague lamented my not wearing a hat to work. In all honesty I just didn't feel like wearing one. Simple as that.

I have still never received an Indiana Jones comment. At least I don't think so, but that probably will not come as a surprise to anyone.

 

[1mach1]

I know exactly what you mean, MothPrey. DC is an unforgiving town. Welcome, by the way!

 

[MothPrey]

Thanks for the kind welcome.

I do think a lot of it has to do with my geographic location. I'd guess that my impressions might be a little harder to credit in other areas of the country.

 

[MothPrey]

HER pov is sexist, prejudiced and discriminatory actually.

What you are describing seems to me the dictatorship of the mindless mayority steered by demagogy.

She was very polite about it.

I don't know much about the issue. I did web searches on the words "fedora" and "sexist" together and was surprised at the number of hits I got, although I haven't read much of it yet. I gather there is a latter-generation feminist "backlash" against the kind of fedoras that young hipster men are starting to wear, which has nothing much to do with me, but I guess there may be some spillover if it's becoming a "thing" in the culture.

I confess that my first instinct is to say "too bad", I'm no more inclined to let them determine how I dress than I assume they are to let me determine how they dress, but I'll read more of their arguments with an open mind in case there's some concept there that hasn't occurred to me.

Sometime.

 

[CRH]

Thanks for the kind welcome.

I do think a lot of it has to do with my geographic location. I'd guess that my impressions might be a little harder to credit in other areas of the country.

This is the only place where you can get your martini stirred with a Mojo. :eeek:

 

[gtdean48]

Welcome to the Lounge.
I used to ride public transit into Metro Atlanta for work.
I'd get a lot of looks & more than the occasional "Marlboro Man" comments, when not even wearing my western brims....

I don't wear hats except for me. Now, after dealing with Basil Cell & Melanoma skin cancers, I have even more incentive to wear a hat. I've worn hats & caps my entire life. Comments won't stop that ever....

 

[STEVIEBOY1]

STEVIEBOY, the very same thing happened to me this morning, not once but twice. Where abouts are you in London? I live in Wanstead. This morning I went shopping for a few groceries for lunch. my wife is recovering from surgery, I am doing the house-husband bit, and lunch is part of that bit.

At the checkout, Sophie, (the name on her badge) who must be underage, was the cashier pricing my purchases. Underage for alcohol because she called a supervisor to pass the bottle of wine I had bought. The supervisor, had looked at my hat, for what seemed like, too long just for curiosity. "My hat is always a talking point," I interspersed, as a get out for her staring. "Your hat is fabulous," she answered, but your shoes, oh, your shoes are just wow!" By now, Sophie couldn't contain herself, she got up from the till, looked at my spectators and said: "If only my boyfriend would look like you." Aw shucks Sophie, you just made my day. I didn't say it, but my grin must have shown it.

Out in the car park a couple of youths were skate boarding. I came in for some ribbing when I put my purchases into the car. "Man, what sort of **** do you look like? Said one of them. Not wishing to get into confrontation with two strongly built adult teenagers, I just smiled and said: "Only too happy to give you a good laugh." The second youth asked if he could take a photo of me on his phone. "By all means," I replied, hand on hips a la supermodel. These two lads had the uniform of today on. Baseball cap, worn askew. T-shirt that looked like it had a pot of paint thrown at it, jeans worn so low, that at any moment they might be prosecuted for indecent exposure. Once the photos were done, and the confrontational atmosphere lessened, I just asked, "Why am I such a ****? "Man," the first one said, "If only."

I need to tell you that there were a lot of profanities coming from these two, although you might have deduced that. But I cannot repeat said profanities because I like this forum and don't want to get myself suspended, or banned.

"If only what?" I encouraged. adding, "if only my friends wouldn't mock me." I went on, "you two only do and dress as part of your group. It's called: Herd instinct. You don't want to stand out." The reply almost shocked me. "Man, how did you know?" Because I was young once you silly arse," I thought, but didn't say. The youth went on: "Where do you get shoes like that?" "Are you serious?" I replied. "No," he answered, honestly. "But like you said:If only my pals didn't take the p*ss out of me." "You'll get there," I said, smiling, as I got into my car, and drove off. Another convert.

What did I look like that was so controversial?I had a Henley blazer on, it's stripped with dark colours, mostly burgundy, with a little bottle green, navy and some fine, only just visible, gold pinstripes. My trousers are an elephant grey kind of colour. The shirt is a Darcy spear point, an art deco red tie, some red & grey fair isle socks, a pair of art deco cufflinks, my new, oxblood and ivory spectator shoes all topped by the new Stetson, in a colour that is described as Caribou. See below for details: The only problem with the photo is that I had to set the camera up and race back into position. I didn't realise there wasn't enough light to get all the details. But then again, everyone here doesn't need a pictorial definition at all.

That is a very smart look you have there sir. It was nice the check out girls liked your gear and the confrontation you had with those youths in the car park sounds like it was not so bad infact. Sometimes the words used by the teenagers now sound worse than they really are and have different meanings to them. For example "bad", "wicked" or "Sick" in youthspeak have very positive meanings to the younger generation.

Going back to being complimented on one's attire, (I live just out side West London, in answer to your question). I have been complimented too when wearing some of my smarter pullovers, for example a navy blue Guernsey, long sleeve cricket sweaters, or one of my V-neck uniform pullovers when being worn with a tie. I think this all stemmed from when I was at school in the 1960s and 1970s when we had to wear uniform there and if one did at least not have a white or grey shirt, tie & pullover, you got into serious trouble. Although some kids did not like it, it did not worry me at all.

 

[Crazy Dave]

This is a very complex subject- I could probably write a book. There are a LOT of factors at work.
Dressing for weather is not "cool" to these people, and a lot of them go to great lengths to avoid it. Year in, year out, I see people with no hats and no umbrellas, not infrequently with no coat or jacket of any kind, out walking their dogs, soaked to the skin, when it's been raining for hours or day- they were not caught by surprise. I had a boss once, younger guy, who not only refused to wear a coat regardless of the weather but refused to have one in his car, and often said with pride "I never let the weather affect my actions".

This is a phenomenon also known as "natural selection".

I know the comments and looks can really be rough and hurtful sometimes, but it basically boils down to what YOU want to do. People have the right to an opinion, just as you have the right to ignore it and exercise your personal freedom.

I also, just last week, had a young woman at work ask "Aren't you afraid people will think you're sexist?".

If this happens again tell her that that is a very stupid remark, but you understand she can't help it on account of being a woman.

 

[Huertecilla]

AGAIN!

Allthough I have worn/wear hats a lot for utilitarian puposes I have only JUST starting wearing one for going out in public. Today me and my gf went to the nearest city for legal/red tape and some shopping. First time ever that I wore a proper quality hat, a vintage fedora, in this context.

Even though hat wearing is faily common here, this hat stands out because of its flair and obvious quality.
I was AMAZED by the amount of looks it drew and depite the smartly dressed attractive woman at my arm I received SEVERAL flirtatious looks from women. One SO obvious that my gf gave me an incredulous/inquisitive look.

Since hat wearing is not unusual here it must be more about being stylish than about hat wearing per se, like GHT observed too. With hat it is just more obvious I suppose.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

There does, however, sadly seem to be a much greater degree of conformity to an anonymous norm than was the case in my day.

Somehow this specimen comes to mind.

Then there's also the "broniform" (cargo shorts, t-shirt, ballcap ensemble). :doh: