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These Insane Viral Trends and Fads Overtook History Long Before the Internet

Khalid Elhassan July 13, 2022 37 min

Viral - Marathon dancers in 1923 — Marathon dancers in 1923. Library of Congress

21. The Fashion Police, or More Like Fashion Mob

Fashion are so slack these days 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 rule that men should not wear straw hats after September 15^th was taken seriously – too seriously. Those who defied that bit of convention ran afoul of the fashion police – or more accurately, the fashion mob. A man who wore a straw hat after September 15^thwas fair game for anybody who wanted to snatch it off his dome and stomp it to smithereens. Many went along, good-naturedly. Some, however, saw the snatching and destruction of their private property by strangers as what it actually was: a crime.

Resistance did not end what had become a viral practice, however. It merely 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 violence 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 stood up for their right to wear whatever they wanted whenever they wanted, and resisted the wrecking of their straw hats. For their trouble, they came close to getting 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.