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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

11. Policing Fashion With Firearms

Fashion - President Calvin Coolidge at a ball park with a straw hat — President Calvin Coolidge at a ball park with a straw hat. Medium

As crime and violence spread, some straw hat wearers in Pittsburgh pulled guns to protect their headgear. Elsewhere in the city, some had their hats taken off their heads at gunpoint. Eventually, police were mobilized to disperse the rioters, and serious bloodshed and loss of life was narrowly avoided. The next day, many newspapers wrote it off as “youthful exuberance”. As the scale of September 15^th rioting grew in subsequent years, however, the public’s and the media’s patience with such exuberance grew thin. Violent youth gangs that roam city streets and assault hapless passersby have probably been around since cities first came into existence. However, it has probably been a long time since such youthful gang violence was driven by an intense dislike of the victims’ fashion choices.

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.