Why did brims get stingy?

[belfastboy]

Intersting topic. I've always thought it was a city vs country thing, a matter or practicality. Ive recently been watching Ken Burns series on the Rosevelts. Some great hat stills and news reel clips with hundreds of vintage lids. I guess we should ask why man started putting things on his heads in the first place. I doubt it was a fasion statement. I suspect that is is largly driven by the fairer sex. Was it not because we didn't like to get burned by that big bright thing in the sky. When we lived primarily in an agrarian society we wore hats and long sleeves for protection. The hats had wide brims. In the industrial age we moved to the big cities with their tall buildings blocking out the sun and maybe society did not see the need for as much hat except to keep warm in the winter. Is there a correlation between the change in brim width and the migration into the city? If this was a factor you would naturally see more narrow brims in the stores in New York and more wider brims in the merchantile in Wilcox Arizona. And since the heavily populated city shops sell more hats, they direct the market.

In London at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution the air quality was abysmal. The particulate in the air was horrible and as hair shampoo had not been invented yet, hats were an important hygienic addition to a wardrobe regardless of one's station in life.

 

[Bird Lives]

If stingy brims are the death of style....then I guess hat styles were dead by the thirty's...

Here's some pics of Cagney, Astaire, and Spencer Tracy....but there are so many...of course Sinatra and the Rat Pack made those racing type felts so popular....and the stingy brims from the 30's had tall crowns...but some of the stingy brims from the 60's had tallish crowns...

Bond's famous Lock & Co trilby had looks like to me a 5" crown....

I don't think it's a loss of style....just more choices of style....although those cloth trilbys that Sinatra later had made by Cavanaugh to match each suit he had made...that might have been a sign that things weren't going well in the hatter business....lol! Even I might have to draw the line there and with Bear Bryant's hounds tooth fedora....whew...but it did work for him...and they sold a ton of those to his supportors and fans....

 

[GHT]

Another "practicle" corrolation question. Do blokes wear wide brims in foggy London? Do we see more wide brims on the mid west plaines than in overcast Seattle?

They tend to wear peaks, pointing rearwards, And London hasn't seen a fog since The Clean Air Act of the 1950's. You still get an occasional early morning mist, but the pea-soupers have been consigned to history.

 

[MJL]

This has to do with a combination of collapsing rural life styles that occurred in the post-WWII era and the demands of emerging suburbs in America that by design forced people into cars instead of walking on sidewalks to destinations. Rural folks wear wide brimmed hats due to necessity of protection from the weather, when the mechanization of farming occurred in earnest after WWI (but was really pushed in earnest during the post Great Depression period) there began an exodus of surplus folks into the cities. At the same time the rural/city dream of living a non urban life but with the pleasures of the urban world nearby began to spur the creation of post WWII suburban cities. Driving in cars with hats on quickly forced an abandonment of hats; first of tall crowns and wide brims but eventually altogether.