Look at any photograph of a group of people outside in public, taken in the Americas or western Europe in the 19th or early 20th century, and nearly every male over the age of about six will be wearing some sort of head covering -  summer, winter, at work, travelling, at a social event or just in the street - wearing a hat was simply de rigueur.


The almost exclusively male crowd of spectators for the Brighton and Hove Albion v Cardiff City football match on 20 March 1920 at the club's original Goldstone stadium ... which is in Hove, actually . I can see many hats in a variety of styles but very few bare heads.

These days - provided one overlooks the baseball caps and beanies worn by perpetual adultescents - grown men rarely wear proper hats unless they are part of an official uniform and/or safety equipment. So when and why did the wearing of hats decline?

I can think of several possible reasons. Hat-wearing isn’t really compatible with car travel, if you can drive anywhere in the warm and dry and without needing to stand around at bus stops, there's no need for a hat. Was hat-wearing linked to increasing car ownership? Furthermore as family cars got smaller it became increasingly difficult to wear a hat in one, the mid-1950s Morris Oxford probably being the last saloon car with a high enough roof. It was also apparently why in the mid-1980s the French Gendarmerie gave up their képis except for ceremonial occasions: you physically couldn't wear one in a patrol car (they now have flexible 'forage caps' that can be carried under a shoulder epaulette and which look similar to the one my dad had when he was in the RAF). Doubtless the same is true for British Bobbies' helmets, which were first replaced by soft peaked-caps and then nowadays by often no cap at all while on simple community policing.

Men being demobbed following WW2 probably wanted to drop anything that harked back to a uniform or that marked one's social rank and status (despite every demob suit coming with a hat, usually a choice of either a trilby or a flat cap). Also the notion of the teenager took off, and with it different hair styles, brill cream and the quiff, with hats being seen as markers of establishment and middle age. In 1961 President Kennedy famously refused to wear a hat throughout his inauguration as he apparently thought that wearing a hat would "make him look old." However despite a general fading away of many social distinctions, hats still continued to hold their role as class markers.


'The Class Sketch', from The Frost Report (7 April 1966).

Prior to WW1 long hair was quite popular as it distinguished the better classes from prisoners, soldiers, labourers and factory workers who had to keep their hair shorn very short for practical reasons of hygiene, safety and regulations. By the 1950s the Clean Air Acts had greatly reduced the incidence of airborne ash and smuts, while better household sanitation mean that bathing was no longer restricted to once a week at best. Accordingly there was a reduced need to wear a hat simply to maintain a clean and neat appearance. Then during the 60s lacking a hat became a signal of counter culture, a way to show off your long hair as a flag of youth. And I doubt the big hair styles of the 80s could have have happened in a hat-wearing era. And what are we to make of the Trump-following pensioners with their MAGA baseball caps, or Dominic Cummings with his scruffy beanies and hoodies?

So let's talk about hats - men's headgear certainly - but also women's and children's too if you want.

When I was a child in the 50s and 60s my great-uncle always wore a hat (inside too?) and smoked a pipe, although I think it is a exaggeration to say people smoked pipes; usually they pottered with the smoke putting it in the pipe and pressing it down.
My father, who was 44 when he died and I was nearly 16, was the only man I knew who never wore a hat. Whether that was a reaction to his time in the war (which he absolutely loathed - "If there's another one I'll take to the hills") I don't know. I do know that on our farm we never owned a gun, and I don't know if that was common or not. My uncle's farm certainly had guns.
I know my grandmother wore a hat, probably whenever she left the house. It was a source of great problems on Sundays when we went to church and had to decide what to wear. I think most photos of me as a child didn't have me wearing hat, but at secondary school we had to wear a hat (out of doors) as part of our uniform. I have photos of me going to church, aged about 16 or 17, and I don't have a hat on there, though my aunt has. Now I mostly wear a hat at home just when an important horse race meeting (the Melbourne Cup or the NZ Trotting Cup) is on and we are watching on the telly. It's just a bit of fun.

In my opening comments I sounded rather contemptuous of men wearing baseball caps and beanies, but actually I wear both myself. These days I don't have a lot of hair up top so if I'm outside in the garden I often wear a cap against the summer sun or a beanie or a 'Peruvian-style' woolly hat with earflaps for winter warmth. As I live in an old house without double-glazing and with 4m high ceilings, in winter I generally wear my beanie all day, even inside, plus several layers of pullovers/fleeces (I'm wearing it while typing this as it's only 10°C in the house this morning). And I'll often wear a warm hat if I go to town - a beanie can of course be worn in a car - although I do always take it off when I enter a shop or other premises. Currently that means a bit of awkward juggling as I remove my hat, pull the straps of my obligatory facemask up over my head, and then push my glasses up to my brow because they've fogged up and I can't see.

My Dad used to commute to work by train and so either walked to the railway station or caught the bus from the end of the road. In inclement weather he always wore a trilby. Likewise in the 1990s when I worked 15mins walking distance from home, I too took to wearing a trilby when it was raining - I'm not keen on umbrellas. Being only in my 30s it used to prompt comments but a properly lined trilby is proof against rain, as well as being smart to go with my jacket, tie and long raincoat. When I went to the shops yesterday I did notice quite a few men in hats. It was quite cold so beanies and sundry other woolly hats - with or without pompoms, earflaps or chinstraps - were quite in evidence. There were also a couple of elderly chaps wearing berets, which I know sounds a bit clichéd (it being southern France) but it's a rural area and berets and flat cloth caps are still reasonably common amongst gentlemen of a certain age. Occasionally one might even see a traditional Catalan barretina (from the diminutive of barret, a cap - it's a floppy conical wool hat similar to a Phrygian cap) but that is probably more to do with demonstrating pride in their Catalan heritage. And in summer wide-brimmed straw hats like panamas are quite common here being very practical protection against the powerful Mediterranean sun (I think I have one somewhere but I haven't wore it for years).

Women of course have continued to wear hats on more formal occasions, such as in church. My mother always wore a hat to church (even when her local church became more modern and trendy to attract a younger congregation) and at weddings she would not remove her hat during the wedding meal. She didn't however usually wear one when dining out in a classy restaurant (not that my parents often did so). When did that practice generally go out of fashion - the 1960s?

I recall my Mother having hats, but I don't recall her ever wearing them.

Dad was usually wearing a cap when biking off to work, all the year in all kinds of weather.

My eldest brother would wear the caps he was issued as part of his railway uniforms.

I remember my middle brother - in the mid 1960s - wearing a hat of the style James Bond wore in the early films, and that I unkindly said it made him look old.

I never saw my sisters-in-law wearing headgear of any kind, except scarves when doing heavy washing or spring clean.

So my reference frame MM, tend to agree with you and perhaps say a little earlier even in this outback.


An addition, edited in a day later
OTOH MM,
When looking for something else on Youtube I found this 






Among the comments below this one's relevant to your question, I think

"Bowlers and umbrellas are for officers only. OR's don't wear hats... That's so they're not required to salute.."

This series of photographs showing a hundred years of demonstrations and protests at Trafalgar Square provides a useful (if not necessarily scientific) tracker:

100 years of protesting at Trafalgar Square (1908 - 1949)

100 years of protesting at Trafalgar Square (1949 - 1971) 

100 years of protesting at Trafalgar Square (1971 - 2006) 

In the early photos from the Edwardian era, hat-wearing (for men, women and children) is virtually universal. There is a picture of George Bernard Shaw at a rally where he is conspicuous by being the only bareheaded person. It’s not until the 1930s that one begins to see a few bareheaded men and boys and even some women. By the late 1930s and into the 1940s the number of bareheaded people (particularly among younger men) shoots up but they are generally still outnumbered by those wearing hats. By the late 1940s there is already evidence of crowds in which hat-wearers are outnumbered by those not wearing hats and by the late 1950s there is a picture in which nobody is wearing a hat except for one boy and a policeman. From the 1960s onwards it then becomes a game of spot-the-hat. There are, of course, variables. The weather no doubt played a part in whether people chose to wear hats to, say, a demonstration in February compared to, say, a rally in June. Some of those at the H-bomb test protest in May 1957, for instance, seem to have been caught out by the rain having neither hats nor brollies with them. And the Countryside Alliance demonstration of March 2002 (at that time the largest in the history of Trafalgar Square) saw many marchers sporting hats.