An advertisement in the Popular Magazine, July 7, 1915. A decade later, magazines were warning readers about the sometimes-deadly effects of “reduce-o-mania.” The fashion in beach bodies changes, but the advertiser’s fundamental message remains unaltered: You are defective.
Hats as an essential item of masculine apparel have disappeared so thoroughly that we have forgotten they used to be essential. For many centuries, a man simply did not appear outdoors without a hat. I was reminded of how essential hats were while reading Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s account of his near brush with assassination after the Whiskey Rebellion.
“However, the danger was greater than I had imagined; that night, about eleven o’clock, I was to have been assassinated. The troops had advanced within 20 yards of my door, when an officer, who had been apprised of their intention, and in vain laboured to dissuade them, having run to general Morgan, who was in the house of Neville the younger, and not gone to bed, gave him information. The general and the colonel ran out without their hats, and the general opposing himself to the fury of the troops, said, ‘That it must be through him they would reach me;’ that I had stood my ground; would be cognizable by the judiciary; and let the law take its course.”1
The general and the colonel were in such a hurry that they ran out without their hats. This is how you know it was a desperate emergency. Nothing less would have caused them to neglect their hats, even in the middle of the night.
As late as the 1950s, it was still usual for men to appear hatted outdoors. When George Burns and Gracie Allen moved their show from radio to television, they added a running gag in which men were so flummoxed by Gracie that they would run out of the house without their hats. “Oh! He left his hat,” Gracie would say. “Well, he’ll be back for it.” Then she would open a closet that was filled from floor to ceiling with hats and deposit one more in the collection.
So for anyone who is writing a historical novel, or designing the costumes for a period piece in the theater or movies, here is useful advice: Don’t let your male characters appear outdoors without their hats. They would be terribly embarrassed if you did.