The Perpetual Adolescent...

...or, Another Reason We Should Bring Back the Hat!*

From an essay in The Weekly Standard:

"WHENEVER ANYONE under the age of 50 sees old newsreel film of Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak of 1941, he is almost certain to be brought up by the fact that nearly everyone in the male-dominated crowds--in New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland--seems to be wearing a suit and a fedora or other serious adult hat. The people in those earlier baseball crowds, though watching a boyish game, nonetheless had a radically different conception of themselves than most Americans do now. A major depression was ending, a world war was on. Even though they were watching an entertainment that took most of them back to their boyhoods, they thought of themselves as adults, no longer kids, but grown-ups, adults, men." (emphasis mine)

Exactly. Serious men wear serious hats. Or at least know to dress like an adult when the occasion requires. Now contrast that image with what you find today:

"This informality has now been institutionalized. Few are the restaurants that could any longer hope to stay in business if they required men to wear a jacket and tie. Today one sees men wearing baseball caps--some worn backwards--while eating indoors in quite good restaurants."

First and foremost, there's only one reason for wearing a baseball hat backwards: you're the starting catcher.

Secondly, if you don't know when it's appropriate to dress up, you're an ignoramus. Everytime I go to say, Symphony, or a show at the Wang, I'm shocked at the number of people who are attending and are dressed like they're lounging around their living room or catching a Buffet show. Did no one ever teach them to dress appropriately for the occasion? Are they oblivious to the fact that it's disrespectful to the performers to show up for their show looking you rolled out of bed?

"At a certain point in American life, the young ceased to be viewed as a transient class and youth as a phase of life through which everyone soon passed. Instead, youthfulness was vaunted and carried a special moral status. Adolescence triumphed, becoming a permanent condition. As one grew older, one was presented with two choices, to seem an old fogey for attempting to live according to one's own standard of adulthood, or to go with the flow and adapt some variant of pulling one's long gray hair back into a ponytail, struggling into the spandex shorts, working on those abs, and ending one's days among the Rip Van With-Its. Not, I think, a handsome set of alternatives."

Hence the inexplicable inability of certain people to wear body- or age-appropriate clothing.

I could go on and on quoting from this essay. Really, you should just read it for yourself.

*And by hat, I mean fedoras thankyouverymuch.

UPDATE: Heather seconds the notion of a fedora revival. I'm going to have purchase a new one for her wedding though; mine is rather battered.