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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

8. When New York’s Fashion Police Pounded Straw Hat Wearers to a Pulp

Coverage of NYC’s 1922 Straw Hat Riots. Daily Province

The next night, the crime spree intensified when youth gangs returned to roaming the streets of Manhattan. This time, they did not show up empty handed, but armed themselves with whatever was handy and capable of inflicting damage, from literal sticks and stones up to nail-studded clubs. Straw hat wearers who crossed their path were lucky to get away with just losing their hats. The unlucky ones lost their hats and got beaten to a pulp. Police were helpless, and the rioting went on for days, spreading from the East Side to the rest of Manhattan. The Upper West Side became particularly dangerous for the straw-lidded, as witnesses reported a mob of more than 1000, snatching straw hats on Amsterdam Avenue.

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.