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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

9. New York’s Dockworkers Refused to Go Along With the Straw Hat Fashion Rules

Fashion - New York City crowd in 1921, mostly wearing straw hats — New York City crowd in 1921, mostly wearing straw hats. Library of Congress

Unfortunately for New York’s young hoodlums, the dockworkers refused to go along, or see the humor in having some snot nosed kids tell them what they could wear and when they could wear it. They got ticked off, fought back, and beat up the brats. Things escalated, and that night, widespread mayhem and crime engulfed Manhattan. After they got whupped by the dockworkers, the kids regrouped in ever-larger and increasingly more violent gangs. Soon, mobs of out of control youth were snatching hats off heads, attacking people en masse, and beating up any who resisted. New York City’s 1922 Straw Hat Riot went on for days. The initial mayhem on the night of September 13^th grew so widespread and got so bad that it halted traffic on the Manhattan Bridge. Police reinforcements were rushed in to end the rioting, but as seen below, the relief was only temporary.

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.