To check whether I wasn't overestimating just how many hats there were, I went through and counted. Sure enough, the issue contained 60 images of women wearing hats. In addition, there were 23 images of women wearing some kind of non-hat head decoration: 5 flowers, 6 bows, 2 turbans, 6 tiaras, 13 headbands, 1 large pin, 2 feathers, 4 colored hair extensions, 3 sunglasses-on-top-of-heads, 1 visor, and 3 full-deployed hoods on hoodies. 83 head accessories in all.
This is a big deal. That is way more hats and hatlike accessories than any magazine has shown in a long time. It's definitely a trend, one that Teen Vogue's editors seem to be pushing and which therefore has a good chance of catching on.
What do all the hats mean? Since hat-wearing is associated with the past, and particularly with Jackie O and the early 1960s, hats may be popular because of the recent Camelot nostalgia in coverage of the 2008 election. They also fit in with the return to conservative dressing for fall 2008. Recently young trendsetters have played around with hats as fun, often vintage-y accessories, and in recent years we've seen the trucker hat, the cowboy hat, the hippie headband, and the fedora have comebacks.
But I see hats and other head decorations as more than just another ingredient to throw into the style-mixing blender. I group them with the veils, masks, and hoods that have also appeared on runways in the past few seasons; as such, they are part of an ongoing, long-range ideological fashion trend, as opposed to being a fleeting fad.
Hats are profoundly traditional, symbolic, ritualistic clothing items. Throughout history they have been indicators of religious affiliation, class status, and even political belief. Hats are carriers and indicators of meaning, and the reemergence of the hat signals people's waxing interest in meaningfulness. This trend signals that people are interested in identifying with, believing in, and standing for something. In this way, hats are very post-postmodern.
It's curious that hats are returning just as there's been renewed interest in JFK in the form of comparisons between him and Obama. JFK was the first US president to go hatless; this choice caused quite a stir, for at the time the hat was a key component of standard business dress, and going without one was somewhat shockingly informal. But I don't think the return of hats means a return to formality, because the trend toward informality is extremely strong. For instance, Obama has recently been echoing Kennedy's hatlessness by often going tieless.
I think the popularity of hats has more to do with maturity than formality. JFK's reason for not wearing a hat was that he thought hats made him look old. At the time he was elected, America's idealism about the future was very tied to positive associations between youth and progress. The same thing is going on today, except that youth is being conceived of in a different way. Simply being young is not the point; rather, it's the capacity of young people to display maturity, and thereby to increase the credibility and value of youth culture as a whole, that is gaining attention and favor.
The fact that stylish young people are donning hats shows that they are ready to actively and positively participate in culture -- adult culture.
What will the new hats look like? I can't wait to see. I'm hoping that the "reference" hats we've seen recently, like the trapper hat, will give way to exciting original designs within the next year.
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