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 15th 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 15th was 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 15th, 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.