38. When Headgear Fashion Was Serious Business
Nowadays, fashion rules have grown so slack 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 rigorous rule that men should not wear straw hats after September 15th meant that those who defied that bit of convention ran afoul of the fashion police – or more accurately, the fashion mob.
A man wearing a straw hat after September 15th was fair game for anybody who wanted to snatch it off his dome and stomp it to smithereens. Many went along, good-naturedly, but some treated having their private property snatched and destroyed by strangers as what it actually was: a crime. Resistance did not end the practice, however, but only emboldened the straw hat fashion police to gather in mobs for mutual protection – or mutual bullying – and get more violent.
Related: Our Fashion Choices Today Would Have Been Extremely Questionable in History.