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Crime Waves and Savage Fads From History That Were Just Unnatural

Khalid Elhassan June 18, 2020 35 min

38. When Headgear Fashion Was Serious Business

Nowadays, fashion rules have grown so slack that even sweatpants and hoodies can be treated as acceptable boardroom attire. Things were different in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when fashion – especially headgear fashion – was serious business. The rigorous rule that men should not wear straw hats after September 15^th meant that those who defied that bit of convention ran afoul of the fashion police – or more accurately, the fashion mob.

A man wearing a straw hat after September 15^th was fair game for anybody who wanted to snatch it off his dome and stomp it to smithereens. Many went along, good-naturedly, but some treated having their private property snatched and destroyed by strangers as what it actually was: a crime. Resistance did not end the practice, however, but only emboldened the straw hat fashion police to gather in mobs for mutual protection – or mutual bullying – and get more violent.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.