Now I understand Fedora's passing on his hat to young Indy as a "right of passage" (nm)

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Posted by Steve from ppp-19.COL.cableone.net on December 15, 1999 at 05:16:43:

In Reply to: Interesting article concerning fashion, long post... posted by Mr. Havlock on December 14, 1999 at 19:23:32:

: This is taken from the Dec. 99 issue of readers digest, they got it from the Wall Street Journal. Take it with a grain of salt...

: By Ned Crabb:

: "With various monsters of modern life popping up all around us like cardboard monsters at a fun house, it may seem to some that its a bit off the mark to worry about hats. Nevertheless, I am going to, for the reason that the not wearing of hats, a phenomenon that has grown prevalent in our society, is an indicator of something gone seriously wrong, much as the dissapearance of insect-eating birds may signal a crisis in the environment.
: When I was a boy, (henceforth WIWAB), a youngster began the slow metamorphosis from childhood to man when, during such quaint activities as going out to dinner with his family or attending a semi-formal dance, he hung up his baseball cap and sported a Fedora, a smaller versin of the one Dad wore. Similarly, girls put aside their girl-scout berets and stocking caps and began imitating their mother's more dignified millinery.
: The point is not that I am a crank who longs for a return to a better time, (actually I am a crank, but thats a seperate issue). The point is that hats were once prominent among those garments which symbolized a transition from looking like a child to looking like an adult. A complete ensemble of such clothing gave the wearer an appearance and sense of dignity.
: Along the tortuous social path of these 30 to 40 years, we have lost much of the personal dignity once inherent in our clothes, especially our casual clothes, and I do believe it begins with hats. More and more adults are now dressing like children, as "dress down Fridays" and other excuses for "fun" clothes intrude upon offices everywhere.
: And what are we wearing these days instead of fedoras or even newsboy-style caps for men and cloche or wide brimmed hats for women? We are wearing a baseball cap, once a thing of manly distinction but now made ridiculous because it is almost universally worn reversed, and because it has an open semi-circle in what was once the back of the cap and an inelegant little plastic, adjustable strap. WIWAB, caps were made in sizes varying by eights according to an arcane mathematical formula, and only baseball catchers and movie cameramen wore their caps backward.
: No man, and certainly no woman, looks good or sporty or "cool" in a reversed baseball cap. They look, if you'll pardon the vernacular, like dorks.
: Grandfathers and fathers, once figures of vereration in tweed coats and cardigan sweaters, and grandmothers and mothers, once figures of respect in dresses or tailored slacks and starched blouses, are now seen disporting themselves in public in sweat pants. These are among the ugliest clothing ever concieved, looking, even when laundered, like toddlers dirty pajamas. They never should have left the locker room.
: Now, three generations of American family-children, parents and grandparents-can promenade the avenues of the worlds greatest cities or spas, similarly haberdashed and coutured: baggy shorts; T-shirts or sweat shirts with cartoons of woodpeckers or wart hogs or other images of popular culture icons or asinine one-sentenced philosophies; enormous ugly sneakers garishly decorated with various colors and stripes, zigzag leather strips and mesh fabrics, looking like Buck Rogers spaceships straining to zoom away with the wearers' feet; rediculous little "fanny packs" around their waists; and inevitably those ghastly caps.
: WIWAB, grown men and women had to much respect for themselves and their families to dress like clowns. And this has nothing whatever to do with class or wealth or race. Once, and not so terribly long ago, adults of every class, race and income level conformed, within a wide enough range to permit many different expressions of individuality and regionality, to a generally accepted idea of what men and women should look like. Of course, money, or the lack of it, contributed to considerable variation in the quality, cut and durability of their clothes, but at least even the poorest Americans did not look like something that popped out of a jack-in-the-box.
: In a number of American social-history books, there are star photos of rural and small town Americans living on the hard boundaries of life during the great depression in such states as Oklahoma and Texas and Kansas, or in the midst of bitter labor strikes in the deep south or in Northern industrial towns. Many of them are wearing hats-the men in fedoras, wide brimmed farm hats, stetsons, straw field hats or newsboy caps; the women in bonnets or low crowned hats of felt or straw with wide, floppy brims. You can almost read those people's lives in those battered but somehow proud hats.
: Suffering is written on the faces of these men and women and their children, but when we look at them 60 years later, they still bear a fierce dignity, standig there in their threadbare clothes. At least, when the camera captured their images and exposed their suffering for other to gape at and wonder, they weren't wearing fanny packs or backward baseball caps or T-shirts reading "Beam me up, Scotty."


:
: Well, I have to admit I agree with some of what he said. I think we have lost some "dignity" as far as style goes, but I think he has taken it a bit far. I have yet to see an adult actually dress "like a child" on a dress down friday. I dont think this guy is 'hip' to what us "children" are wearing these days. My dad has never asked to borrow my Doc Martens or my khaki cargo pants, (which, by the way, are 3 sizes to large), and I've never caught him stealing my ray-bans or my kama-sutra T-shirt. Its also obvious this guy hasnt been to a mall recently, almost all Starter ball caps are sized to your head, and are quite expensive. And apparently this guy has also forgotten the 'Zuit-Soot'. Yes, even his generation went a little nuts from time to time.




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