Just Dandy

The alternate title of this post that I’d considered - then rejected - was “Men with hats”, but it’s not just about men with hats – though that was certainly the inspiration.











Pork pie (left) Fedora (right)


There’s a whole thing going on in men’s fashion.. grunge is still going strong, but parallel to that (and sometimes intersecting, when it appropriates facial hair and plaid) is The Dandy. The most frequently spotted element of dandy-ism (sometimes incorporated into a head to toe look, sometimes on its own) is the hat.

And in my empirical, non-objective study of the downtown bar and street scene, I’d say the pork pie and fedora have decisively replaced the trucker on men’s heads. And not just downtown.. I was in Brooklyn on Sunday and can cite a pork pie and fedora spotting there too. Will this look move uptown as many trends do? Could the trucker’s balding frat boy cousin, the baseball hat, be next? (yeah, ok.. not likely. That might require caring on the part of the wearer first..)

I admit I chuckled a bit when I counted 8 guys wearing a pork pie or fedora in a bar last Friday (ca 15% of the male population in the bar, a fairly high ratio), but if it reflects a bit of effort on a guy’s part, I applaud it. And walking around New York on Easter, I saw some really impressive efforts – a fedora paired with a 3 piece suit? If you can pull it off, try it – it can look fantastic. (In the case of the bar on Friday night, it turns out the 8 guys were an Irish stag party, none were in 3 piece suits, and one of them has a cousin in NY who is a hair stylist and she bought their hats, so I’m not sure it counts as a style statement as much as a costume..) But that was certainly not the sole example.

As I mentioned, this look is sometimes head to toe –the toe part of the look is often brogues (which they’re still trying to push onto women, by the way) but sometimes, and in fewer cases, high boots. A guy friend of mine asked me what I thought of men wearing pants tucked into riding boots and I said they’re great if you’ve just come off a horse or about to get on one. I have noticed a couple men wearing jeans tucked into green rubber Hunter boots (wellies) and it didn’t look bad. But I’ll tell you how else it also didn’t look: straight. Depends on what message you want to send.

But all kinds of men are wearing hats again. I’ve even seen 10 year old boys wearing hats (granted, they were Tribeca kids). I am guessing the original influence was “Mad Men”, though maybe “Mad Men” caught on because it reflected our desire to dress up a bit more. Chicken or egg? The wellies, I think, come from the Freeman’s sporting/hunting aesthetic, or maybe the floods upstate. In any case, men with hats are here and if the 10 year olds weren’t convincing enough, here’s the final nail in my argument – not only are new hat stores are opening up, but you can find a pork pie and fedora at every street vendor on St Marks.