Stumbled on a stat about 1920s hats that caught me off guard

I was reading this old fashion history blog the other day and found out that in the 1920s, the average woman owned around 6 hats at any given time, not counting winter ones. That blew my mind since I think I have maybe one beanie and a baseball cap in my closet right now. It made me wonder if people back then just had more closet space or if we've really shifted that much toward casual wear. Has anyone else looked into old fashion numbers and felt surprised by how different things were?

3 comments

3 Comments

daniel_walker14d ago

I get what you're saying but I gotta push back a little. That Sears catalog was a wish list, not a receipt. My grandpa used to tell me people would save up for one nice hat and wear it till it fell apart, same way we do with a good pair of boots today. And those "whole sections" in catalogs were mostly hats for different seasons or specific jobs, not one person buying six at once. Plus think about it, if everyone back then really owned that many hats, we'd find them in every thrift store and attic, but most old hats I see are in museums or passed down as family heirlooms, not sitting in piles at garage sales. Take those old numbers with a grain of salt, a lot of it was marketing trying to make people feel like they needed more than they actually had.

troy83214d ago

Isn't it wild how much standards have changed? I used to think people in old photos just dressed up special for the camera, but then I found this 1920s Sears catalog archive online. They had whole sections just for hats, like pages and pages of them. It really clicked for me that owning half a dozen was just normal life back then, not some special occasion thing. Kinda makes me wonder what people 100 years from now will look back and shake their heads at about our closets...

derekjenkins14d ago

Honestly my friend told me their grandma had a whole dresser just for her hat collection back in the day. She had like ten different ones for different days of the week apparently. Crazy to think we just throw on a hoodie now and call it good.