Dad Hats Have Finally Returned From Buying Cigarettes
Why the classic yet cast away chapeau appears en vogue again, plus some favorites to buy right now
Watching tennis at the U.S. Open this summer, James and I got into a little discussion in-between sets about how seemingly overnight all our fashionable friends were once again donning dad hats (or dad caps). Granted we were amongst a sea of them—easily the tournament’s most popular merch no matter the year—but still, civilians aside, there was definitely something in the air beckoning me to mentally squat on this take that dad hats were about to be back in a big way. If my dog shit memory serves me correctly, I believe both of us were even wearing some variety of the classic on our own domepieces that day. So, how did we get here?
Obviously dad hats never left left, but, and I hate to be that guy, they definitely were “ruined” to some degree thanks to a proliferation of destined-for-a-garbage-dump designs due to their so-easy-to-make-a-redacted-could-do-it production. Not that there’s ever been a revelatory dad hat or anything—this is after all simply six panels of unstructured cotton twill with a buckled strap and pre-curved brim we’re mostly talking about—we all just know a bad one when we see one. And we’ve seen A LOT. Whether served up in an Instagram ad or begging to be unloaded as free swag at some begrudgingly attended event, they usually feature an embarrassing brand logo or some pathetic meme adjacent graphic/slogan. If merch was dead, the dad hat was surely burning in hell. As it turns out, not all damnation is eternal.
Jawnz are always rising and falling in America. As the dad hat fell, a bunch of other caps took its place on curated timelines: trucker and rodeo styles with crowns that reached for the sky and the basically perfect Yupoong snapback and Cameo velcro blanks to name a few. Not that there’s anything wrong with the aforementioned options of course, nevertheless whether vintage or new, it’s hard to not wanna Cobain away the pain when you peep some scene douchebag, zood shell or crisis actor shill rocking a go-to up top from your own extremely thoughtful and tasteful rotation. So we persist, and persist we must, because, sure, we are equally bad and broken, but in a more thoughtful and tasteful way.