I never really looked into Quota, do people get paid for answers or something? Half the answers I read seem like someone just compiling random things they found in related Google searches.
Fashion sure has changed a lot over the years. Used to be unthinkable for a man (or even a woman) to venture outside without a hat on.
Even if you look at TV shows from the early 90's, you will see fashions that will never be worn today, women's dress was definitely more modest and conservative.
When I was in the army recently there was a rule that was weird to me. Always have your hat on outside but as soon as you get inside take it off. I've definitely been yelled at because of forgetting to take off my hat or put it on, all in all pretty weird.
This isn't a "weird rule", it's just the standard for male politeness that was universal for the last 4000 years. (Give or take; essentially since hats were invented.)
Its still as weired rule - think about it, why is hat the only garment that is 'rude'. Noone would get offended at yoy wearing a fur coat indoors, youd just look stupid
I understand why someone can be offended if you are wearing a coat indoors, especially if you are invited.
It signals that you are uncomfortable, that you intend to leave soon, essentially that you don't enjoy being here with me.
I remember some people being quite insistent that I should take my coat/jacket off, they say something like "make yourself comfortable" but I understand it more as a polite way of saying "take off your coat, you asshole". I guess the same can be said of hats.
I think the difference is when people deliberately violate a rule they at least should have known vs. just showing that they are an outsider by not seeming to know it. Of course, there are all kinds of variations and cases in between. Fashion is, among other things, a communication code and a signal of conformism or dissent.
Besides, the rules about wearing a hat inside can be quite complex: women have to wear a had while men have to take it off (traditional church service in Europe); high ranking men wearing their hats, while lower ranking men have to take them off; petitioners removing their hat in front of the benefactor ...
There are all sorts of strange and inconsistent rules that we (as a species) make up all the time. The number and arbitrariness of these rules helps keep other people in our society on their toes and uncomfortable, anxious and vulnerable to criticism and as a result, easy to manipulate and control.
A hat signifies status. Consider the top hat - it signifies wealth. Or the general's hat - think of Wellington and Napoleon. They signify authority.
It's inappropriate to walk into someone's parlour as a guest, while disporting the mark of your superiority. Baring your head signifies humility. It's just polite.
In the past, maybe. I don't think it does so much now (at least in my part of the US). If it signifies anything besides aesthetics, it's signifying that the person is part of some defined group. Status doesn't enter into it.
> while disporting the mark of your superiority.
So, keeping your "low status" hat on would be OK? (I'm assuming that there is such a thing -- that some hats are "high status" implies that there exists the opposite).
> So, keeping your "low status" hat on would be OK?
Baring your head is the sign of humility. It doesn't matter which hat you have to doff.
In the UK, a "low status" hat would have been be a flat-hat, or flat cap. It used to be a worker's hat; it was also worn by countrymen - farmers, country landowners, gamekeepers and the like - but not in town.
Nowadays I often see expensive tweed flat-hats on the heads of fashionable, well-to-do townies. To me, that look is poncey.
Agreed, I was born in the UK in 68, I've rarely worn a hat (baseball cap if its sunny) - but always take it off when going indoors. No gentleman should wear a hat inside.
Jewish men have worn the kippah (small hat) essentially all the time for much of that period. Especially indoors, in a synagogue. It's a symbol of respect for God.
The "take the hat off indoors but always wear it outdoors" certainly hasn't been universal in western Europe for the last 4000 years.
In many countries, wearing a hat indoors is still perceived as very rude - even more so while eating at a table. Guess how you can tell the American tourists :)
Instead of calling it weird, we could also ask what might have been the reason for this. Cliche rules and etiquette often have a function, even though we might have forgotten what that function was.
We don't put shoes on the table, it is considered impolite. The reasoning is simple, shoes can be dirty and you don't want them on the table where you might be eating some time later.
If hats were only worn outside, maybe they were dirty too? I do like the idea that people wore hats because you could expect to have poo flying out of windows and it would fit this context too.
It is weird the things that are ingrained in you. I went to public school in the US in the 70s/80s. You NEVER wore your hat inside a school building. It just wasn't done.
Now whenever I happen to pickup my high school age children and see kids wearing hats in school I'm actually shocked at how "rude" they are being. It is silly.
Interestingly. During my time in the navy, wearing a cover anywhere inside the skin of the ship was acceptable except for the mess decks. The reason for no wearing of covers in the mess decks was a sign of respect for the dead since mess decks on ships often server as a back up area for medical.
That's just good manners; you bare your head to show respect, as you cross the threshold.
You don't wear a hat in someone's home (or the House Of God, for that matter). And if you want to show respect to someone, you raise your hat (or just tip the brim, if all you're willing to do is go through the motions).
I find that raising my hat tends to cause startled looks. But I still do it.
Hats used to be protection. Either actual protection in old times (helmets) or protection of your identity as some can cover you.
In old times, at least in Europe, discovering yourself was therefore a sign of respect, as it meant voluntarily leaving your guard down in front of someone.
In some Royal courts, that is actually how the king made you a noble, by just saying "you may cover yourself" - only the highest of social ranks was allowed to keep their hat on in front of royalty.
Here in Spain we learn about it because those tropes appear a lot in classic theatre: a person choosing to remain covered in a church is seen as blasfemy, not discovering your cape and hat while passing near a stranger at night is a sign that you are a criminal, etc.
Somehow I never realized until now that the word "discover" taken literally quite clearly means to remove the cover from something. Funny that now it exclusively means "to find something".
Have men really stopped wearing hats? Caps are super popular. Sure you won't see the same hat wearing levels as the 20s, but we are far from universal hatlessness.
People still wear hats, but 100 years ago wearing a hat was literally as much a thing as wearing shoes when you go outside. It all ended around the end of WW2 but there seems to be no real historical consensus why.
I don't know. When I was a kid in the 90ies, it was still common to see older men drive a car wearing a hat. On the other hand, if your car is really not high enough to wear a hat, is it really that inconvenient to take it off when you enter? Men also stopped wearing hats in countries where owning a car was the exception. This theory also implies that somehow, before the car, mobility with a hat on was universally possible. Try riding a bike with fedora. Or a horse.
I feel like cramming yourself into a subway car with a fedora is equally unpleasant. At least in an automobile you can just put the hat in the passenger's seat or something.
When plumbing was added to buildings in cities. Just a theory, but if you were walking down Fleet Street in London pre plumbing, where do you think people were tossing their bodily fluids and solids? I’d want a top hat to provide some separation between my head and what was falling from above.
I don't think that's correct, most plumbing + municipal sewage in London was built in the mid 1800s, whereas hat-wearing persisted well into the mid 1900s.
Hat-wearing might have become fashion. Not that much different from a watch having become fashion, while the functionality of a watch and added value is not that much as it used to be.
I don't wear a watch anymore because I am already required to carry a phone and the phone has every possible function the watch would have. What is the value in the watch at that point? Since I do not check the time that often (there are three clocks on computer desktops/menubars plus a wall clocks in eyesight of me right now) there is little value in having the added convenience of the wrist over the pocket for checking time.
In the Netherlands this topic cannot be mentioned in normal conversation, it gets ridiculed, it could never have happened. But when people from Russia talk about this, it is often with a bit of laughter about Western Europe and its idea of high culture.
This too seems like a very polarized discussion where we may never know to what extent it was true :)
What are you on about? It's not like this comes up in regular conversation. Us Dutch are perfectly aware of times were people wore hats. My father even scolded me, when I forgot to take my cap off at a funeral.
Into the Fleet river? Which literally runs down the middle of Fleet Street (hence it's name). It's still there, under the road in a tunnel that still feeds the Thames.
"My mum (b.1952) said that one of the main things she noticed when JFK came on the scene was that he was shown on the television being interviewed and on the news without a hat, something very unusual at that time, and that “virtually overnight” all the men in Manchester stopped wearing hats. This led us to hypothesise that poor President Kennedy may have been knocked off by a group of irate milliners."
I find hats can get itchy (don't allow my scalp to sweat maybe?) and mess up my hair. I'm sure if I lived anywhere sunny (or where I was more likely to be bopped on the noggin) I might be more used to wearing one.
As-is, my vocation is in an office, and I'd sooner be able to advertise a good head of hair ;-)
My understanding is that demobbed soldiers returning to the UK from WWI were required to wear hats outdoors [citation needed].
The "demob suit" included a hat: either a flat-hat or a felt hat. So by (say) 1920, substantially all men in Britain at least owned a hat. So you see photos of great crowds of working men emerging from a factory in the interwar years, all wearing flat-hats.
When I worked in the City in the early 80's, balances between banks were handled by a company called Union Discount, who employed messengers wearing toppers to walk from bank to bank. At that time, some bankers were still wearing bowlers. No other men were wearing hats then. But that is an echo of how it must have been in (say) the sixties. My guess is that hat-wearing declined with the arrival of Brilkreem, quiffs and ducks-arses, in the fifties. These teen haircuts were strictly incompatible with hat-wearing.
A trilby is still worn by many racetrack bookies; wearing a trilby suggests you are a sort of "Del Boy" wheeler-dealer, and not very trustworthy. I think a felt fedora makes you look a bit like a federal agent from the thirties, or perhaps a pushy US newspaper reporter (with his press-pass tucked into the hatband).
For the most part, the headgear I see around here consists of a baseball cap. TBH I barely consider that a hat at all - it's barely better than a knotted handkerchief. And a lot of men seem to wear some kind of beanie.
I am balding, and what fuzz remains is clipped to a #2. I now always wear a fedora out - felt in cold weather, a panama if it's sunny. I was always bare-headed until about 10 years ago (except I was required to wear a peaked cap at school, sometimes).
I worked with someone a while back who had huge separated spikes in the hair, and who cycled to work. I watched them putting on the cycle helmet - it was done extremely carefully, with the spikes poking through the holes.
Wearing a felt hat these days unfortunately makes you stand out (consider Notch or GRRM and their trademark hats) but after having a carcinoma cut out of my balding scalp I'm all for wearing one. Not worth going bare these days, even if the ozone layer is repairing and I dislike wearing sunscreen when I'm mostly indoors all day.
One thing I noticed watching the "Man of Marble" film, which has some scenes in 1950s Poland, is that hats and elegant(ish) suits are worn by the communist party members, secret police etc. Maybe it's just visual language of the film, which is from 1970s so it's aware of counterculture tropes. I'm not sure what lowly office workers and intelligentsia wore. But it might be that this type of dressing came to be associated with the class of oppressors.
This depends quite a bit on location. I live in a West coast US city, and you see almost no hats in the city. If you go out to more rural areas, almost all men wear hats, either cowboy type or baseball type.
If you live someplace where it rains fairly frequently but usually not too heavily (Seattle, for example [1]) a hat can be quite useful.
The rain here in the Puget Sound area is usual light enough that I'm not going to get too wet when outside for short periods such as going between my car and indoors, taking out the trash, etc except for my glasses.
An umbrella would deal with that but an umbrella occupies a hand.
The rain is usually close enough to vertical that a hat with a brim that is a 1.5 to 2 inches is sufficient to keep the rain off my glasses.
If there is enough wind to make the rain come at an angle, or to threaten to blow off the hat, I have another hat with a chin strap and a wider brim.
[1] Seattle only gets 2 or 3 times as much rain as Los Angeles, and much less than many big eastern or midwestern cities. Seattle's reputation as a rainy city comes from its rain is more uniform than that of cities like Los Angeles--LA gets its rain in a small number of heavy rain events where Seattles has light rain spread out over many many more days, and those eastern cities all get a lot of things that are much worse than rain so it doesn't even occur to people that they are also rainy cities whereas in Seattle rain is about the limit of "bad" weather.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadIn my experience, the percentage of Quora questions that have an actual helpful and correct answer is somewhere in the low single digits.
Even if you look at TV shows from the early 90's, you will see fashions that will never be worn today, women's dress was definitely more modest and conservative.
It signals that you are uncomfortable, that you intend to leave soon, essentially that you don't enjoy being here with me.
I remember some people being quite insistent that I should take my coat/jacket off, they say something like "make yourself comfortable" but I understand it more as a polite way of saying "take off your coat, you asshole". I guess the same can be said of hats.
Interesting. Never in a million years would I have taken that meaning from it. I would just think that the person is cold.
Besides, the rules about wearing a hat inside can be quite complex: women have to wear a had while men have to take it off (traditional church service in Europe); high ranking men wearing their hats, while lower ranking men have to take them off; petitioners removing their hat in front of the benefactor ...
A hat signifies status. Consider the top hat - it signifies wealth. Or the general's hat - think of Wellington and Napoleon. They signify authority.
It's inappropriate to walk into someone's parlour as a guest, while disporting the mark of your superiority. Baring your head signifies humility. It's just polite.
In the past, maybe. I don't think it does so much now (at least in my part of the US). If it signifies anything besides aesthetics, it's signifying that the person is part of some defined group. Status doesn't enter into it.
> while disporting the mark of your superiority.
So, keeping your "low status" hat on would be OK? (I'm assuming that there is such a thing -- that some hats are "high status" implies that there exists the opposite).
Baring your head is the sign of humility. It doesn't matter which hat you have to doff.
In the UK, a "low status" hat would have been be a flat-hat, or flat cap. It used to be a worker's hat; it was also worn by countrymen - farmers, country landowners, gamekeepers and the like - but not in town.
Nowadays I often see expensive tweed flat-hats on the heads of fashionable, well-to-do townies. To me, that look is poncey.
Maybe if this were the 70s, but this is 2021 and wearing a hat indoors is perfectly normal/acceptable.
Romans mostly didn't wear hats.
Jewish men have worn the kippah (small hat) essentially all the time for much of that period. Especially indoors, in a synagogue. It's a symbol of respect for God.
The "take the hat off indoors but always wear it outdoors" certainly hasn't been universal in western Europe for the last 4000 years.
We don't put shoes on the table, it is considered impolite. The reasoning is simple, shoes can be dirty and you don't want them on the table where you might be eating some time later.
If hats were only worn outside, maybe they were dirty too? I do like the idea that people wore hats because you could expect to have poo flying out of windows and it would fit this context too.
Now whenever I happen to pickup my high school age children and see kids wearing hats in school I'm actually shocked at how "rude" they are being. It is silly.
You don't wear a hat in someone's home (or the House Of God, for that matter). And if you want to show respect to someone, you raise your hat (or just tip the brim, if all you're willing to do is go through the motions).
I find that raising my hat tends to cause startled looks. But I still do it.
In old times, at least in Europe, discovering yourself was therefore a sign of respect, as it meant voluntarily leaving your guard down in front of someone.
In some Royal courts, that is actually how the king made you a noble, by just saying "you may cover yourself" - only the highest of social ranks was allowed to keep their hat on in front of royalty.
Here in Spain we learn about it because those tropes appear a lot in classic theatre: a person choosing to remain covered in a church is seen as blasfemy, not discovering your cape and hat while passing near a stranger at night is a sign that you are a criminal, etc.
And, aside, I don’t get it at all! There’s a reason humanity initially switched from pocket watches to wrist watches! Why would you want to go back?!
(I <3 my Pebble)
This too seems like a very polarized discussion where we may never know to what extent it was true :)
"My mum (b.1952) said that one of the main things she noticed when JFK came on the scene was that he was shown on the television being interviewed and on the news without a hat, something very unusual at that time, and that “virtually overnight” all the men in Manchester stopped wearing hats. This led us to hypothesise that poor President Kennedy may have been knocked off by a group of irate milliners."
As-is, my vocation is in an office, and I'd sooner be able to advertise a good head of hair ;-)
The "demob suit" included a hat: either a flat-hat or a felt hat. So by (say) 1920, substantially all men in Britain at least owned a hat. So you see photos of great crowds of working men emerging from a factory in the interwar years, all wearing flat-hats.
When I worked in the City in the early 80's, balances between banks were handled by a company called Union Discount, who employed messengers wearing toppers to walk from bank to bank. At that time, some bankers were still wearing bowlers. No other men were wearing hats then. But that is an echo of how it must have been in (say) the sixties. My guess is that hat-wearing declined with the arrival of Brilkreem, quiffs and ducks-arses, in the fifties. These teen haircuts were strictly incompatible with hat-wearing.
A trilby is still worn by many racetrack bookies; wearing a trilby suggests you are a sort of "Del Boy" wheeler-dealer, and not very trustworthy. I think a felt fedora makes you look a bit like a federal agent from the thirties, or perhaps a pushy US newspaper reporter (with his press-pass tucked into the hatband).
For the most part, the headgear I see around here consists of a baseball cap. TBH I barely consider that a hat at all - it's barely better than a knotted handkerchief. And a lot of men seem to wear some kind of beanie.
I am balding, and what fuzz remains is clipped to a #2. I now always wear a fedora out - felt in cold weather, a panama if it's sunny. I was always bare-headed until about 10 years ago (except I was required to wear a peaked cap at school, sometimes).
The rain here in the Puget Sound area is usual light enough that I'm not going to get too wet when outside for short periods such as going between my car and indoors, taking out the trash, etc except for my glasses.
An umbrella would deal with that but an umbrella occupies a hand.
The rain is usually close enough to vertical that a hat with a brim that is a 1.5 to 2 inches is sufficient to keep the rain off my glasses.
If there is enough wind to make the rain come at an angle, or to threaten to blow off the hat, I have another hat with a chin strap and a wider brim.
[1] Seattle only gets 2 or 3 times as much rain as Los Angeles, and much less than many big eastern or midwestern cities. Seattle's reputation as a rainy city comes from its rain is more uniform than that of cities like Los Angeles--LA gets its rain in a small number of heavy rain events where Seattles has light rain spread out over many many more days, and those eastern cities all get a lot of things that are much worse than rain so it doesn't even occur to people that they are also rainy cities whereas in Seattle rain is about the limit of "bad" weather.