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Fashion Fights: The Straw Hat and Zoot Suit Riots

Khalid Elhassan February 6, 2025 14 min

Fashion - Still from 1943's 'Stormy Weather', featuring Cab Calloway in a zoot suit — Still from 1943's 'Stormy Weather', featuring Cab Calloway in a zoot suit. Smithsonian Magazine

12. Pittsburgh’s Violent “Felt Hat Day”

Crowd gathered in New York’s Time Square in 1921, awaiting results of a boxing bout. Time Archives

Straw hats worn by men after September 15^th were fair game for anybody who wanted to snatch them off their heads and stomp them to smithereens. Many went along, good naturedly. Some, though, saw having their private property seized and destroyed by strangers as what it actually was: a crime. However, resistance only emboldened the straw hat fashion police to gather in mobs for mutual protection – or mutual bullying – and get more violent. Pittsburgh was home to one of the earliest recorded instances of widespread crime, violence, and rioting surrounding the end of straw hat season. On September 15^th, 1910, Felt Hat Day demonstrations were organized. Mobs descended upon straw-lidded pedestrians to snatch away and destroy their headgear. Some men stood up for their right to wear whatever they wanted whenever they wanted, and resisted the wrecking of their straw hats. They were attacked and violently wrecked by the demonstrators.

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.