NEW YORK—It is the summer of 2008, on the streets of Manhattan the heads of the young and fashionable are staying cool, and protected from the sun, by the re-appearance of a staple of mid-20th Century men’s haberdashery, the Fedora.
The hat takes its name from the title of an 1882 play by French dramatist Victorien Sardou. The heroine, princess Fedora, wore a hat in the style it has come to be known by.
No gentleman in the mid 20th Century would have been seen out and about sans chapeau. Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, and Jimmy Stewart all wore theirs to good effect in scores of films, creating nuanced characters with subtle hat handling and wearing techniques.
But in 1961, JFK attended his own Presidential inauguration without a hat, becoming known as Hatless Jack, and signaling the death knell for the Fedora. In the 1960’s the Fedora went into a sharp decline.
The style has popped up in film and music over the years. The Blues Brothers, Jake and Elwood (Dan Akroyd and John Belushi) belted out Chicago Blues under a pair of matching fedoras. It became a trademark for Indiana Jones; Harrison Ford still sporting it in this year’s sequel, 27 years later. Michael Jackson and Freddy Kreuger both became household names sporting fedoras in the 1980’s.
The Epoch Times spotted few of these hat wearing trendsetters on the streets of Manhattan and inquired about their new brims.
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