Assault Rifle Shirt

Sonenscher (1987: 14-15) argues that hats in previous centuries were worn in what we would now call the public sphere but that the public sphere was defined differently to include activities indoors as well as outdoors: “Possession of a hat was an acknowledgment of the codes that governed admission to the particular sphere of public life in question.”The social significance of men’s head coverings is indicated by the fact that, since the early nineteenth century, there has been a great deal of uniformity in what American and European men put on their heads.

Assault Rifle Shirt

At any one time, there were less than a dozen types of hats, each of which might be sold with slight variations in color, size, shape of brim, and material that were not sufficient to prevent its being recognized as belonging to one of the major categories (Wilcox 1945). When a new type of hat was first introduced, there was often a period when it was worn by members of different social classes, but, eventually, it found its “niche” and became the prerogative of a particular social class.