During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump presented himself to America as a Republican candidate in the incredible role of champion of the working class, deprived, in his words “by the establishment”, of their civil rights. What was the tool, beyond his speeches and slogans, to make this impossible mask of his plausible? The way of dressing. And an accessory, above all, which has become iconic in his own way: red, bright and with white writing in capital letters on the front: a baseball cap. Important to note is how Trump wore it, and still wears it. The visor always forward, curved, lowered almost to the eyebrows, and the base of the hat parallel to the ground. It is the way in which in the United States – according to the social sciences that have dedicated themselves to the subject – adult or elderly people, in particular men and women who once served in the army, in the police or who have played a lot of baseball, they generally feel more comfortable wearing it. For this reason, which we could define as a “social macrogroup”, the visor is still functional as a shade creator and the front logo it is an important part of the object, because it serves as a communicative device to establish identity and status. Identify your tribe.
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If we already took a younger target, for example those who came of age in the late Eighties and Nineties, we would notice that they often feel – on average – more comfortable wearing their caps backwards, with the visor rotated at the back of the head. The function of shadow and logo has less meaning for them than for the elderly. The point, rather, is countercultural, that is, ironically representative of a group that on the one hand mocks social norms but on the other maintains access to the institutions that create, maintain, and persevere those norms. Younger people, however, as well as those who grew up along the coasts or in urban areas, will feel more comfortable with visor slightly turned to the right or left. They don’t feel comfortable at all with the visor facing backwards, and certainly not perfectly forwards. They often bend the visor to make it as flat as possible, ending up making it resemble that of another hat, the snapback. The visor almost completely loses its function as a shade device. Sometimes they leave the manufacturer’s label or sticker on the hat, in some cases even more important than the logo itself, which becomes secondary. The purpose of wearing it becomes to establish social identity and communicate counter-cultural tendencies, but in a slightly different way compared to previous groups, because here concepts such as fashion and trends are inserted straight away. In short, they gave it a new meaning.
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Trump has enjoyed a life of privilege and protection since the day he was born. His fashion sense is inherently conservative. He almost always appears in public wearing a blue blazer, the standard uniform of his tribe, the business elite. Without any apparent sense of contradiction or irony, he then used a baseball cap to project an identity that immediately appealed to a small and growing subgroup of the American electorate. It was an effective way to communicate with that tribe. On November 8, 2016, we would find out that it had worked. But how was this accessory so rich in meaning born? To make known the ancestor of baseball cap it was the Brooklyn Excelsiors in 1860: initially it was made of boater, with a short visor and very uncomfortable. Wool was then used to increase player comfort, and in 1901 the Detroit Tigers implemented probably the most far-reaching innovation in the history of the game. cap: They put the eponymous animal on their caps, turning a useful parasol into a battle flag. The advent of television (the first major league game was broadcast on August 26, 1939) brought a whole new audience to the sport and also brought a wave of uniform redesigns. In 1945 each team wore its own branded hat and the hat it soon made its way into the hearts of children, especially those who played in the youth teams and who would carry that look into their adulthood.
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From then on it starts to become a distinctive accessory. The classic baseball hat with curved visor, together with the trucker hat, made with a solid front part and a perforated mesh part at the back, are the models that were the most popular until the nineties, when his entry onto the scene snapbackwhich is actually a baseball hat but, instead of a curve, it has a visor is flat. This time it is no longer spread by athletes, but by rappers: Run DMC, Tupac, Nas, Lil Wayne, but also Willy, the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. All of them wore a snapback as a trademark. But cinema and television series are also included: the use of baseball cap by stars such as Tom Selleck in the role of Magnum PI, the character of MacGyver from the serial of the same name, or Tom Cruise in Top Gun, cemented the coolness of the cap. Whatever your favorite model, the baseball cap in all its forms it is certainly a timeless garment, from the grass field to high fashion, as the recent catwalks also teach. An accessory that has long ceased to be a purely practical garment to become an object full of individual and collective meaning. Up to being a symbol of rebellionas for Mahak Hashemi, a sixteen-year-old Iranian who died last November in Shiraz, her city, in the south of Iran, due to beatings suffered by security agents: she had been going out for weeks without a veil and at the height of the rebellion she wore instead a simple baseball cap. A symbolic gesture, in support of the youth revolution against the regime and in memory of another young woman killed, Mahsa Amini.
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Il baseball cap, thinking about it, is a curious accessory precisely because it contains an oxymoron within itself. If on the one hand it is a means to hide, to hide one’s identity when going out in public like a pair of heavy dark sunglasses, on the other hand, given the thousand invoices, the logos and the colors which are sometimes bright and badges, a means of self-expression. Every single cap is a message, which transmits the tastes, the affiliation (to a team, to a tribe, to a subculture) of the wearer to the rest of the world. Both to those who are endowed with the same habitus – to quote the sociologist Bourdieu – and are therefore able to grasp those references, and to the casual passer-by who looks and walks straight on, perhaps limiting themselves to noticing the bizarre combination or a particular colour. And sometimes even the same object takes on completely different meanings depending on the latitudes, just think of how the logo most famous in the world, that of the New York Yankees, is used casually even by those who don’t know what an inning is, or in Brazil, where the cap is called boné and is omnipresent both on the beaches of Rio and in the bars of Sao Paulo , as in the heads of the finders of the illegal mines deep in the Amazonas. In this country, where football is life and baseball is a mystery, in a land where mentions of Babe Ruth and Aaron Judge will elicit strange looks rather than approval, the brand New Era it is the only one that holds the license to sell merchandising linked to the American Major League, and it has one of the largest markets in the world in Brazil. And the reason is only aesthetic, the association with funky singers, the famous local commercial music genre, for the attempt to emulate American artists and rappers seen on YouTube and for the association with New York understood as a cool city and place with which to identify. A complete reversal.
I baseball caps they have evolved in recent years, going from a casual accessory to wear sweaty after the gym, or to escape the paparazzi, to an indispensable accessory, excellent both on rainy days and on those when you really don’t feel like shampooing. Totally rehabilitated, they now also dominate the catwalks of Gabriela Hearst, JW Anderson, Marine Serre, Burberry, Gucci and Kenzo and in general of unsuspected haute couture brands. In this triumphal march from the catwalks to Instagram, it’s clear that the new object of desire is back to stay. Its new privileged position is the result of an amalgam of trends and also of the fact that during the pandemic, when hairdressers were closed, many of us got used to wearing hats to hide the traumatic results of that torment, while the ubiquity of Zoom has given us real obsessions due to ultra-exposure of our image, and the resulting anxiety, which has exacerbated various agoraphobias and stress over how one’s person is perceived from the outside. Over its long history the baseball cap has become the ticket to membership of a sort democratic style international. Great equalizer precisely because truck drivers or farmers showed it off with the same ease as Lady Diana or the Dalai Lama.
2023-10-14 15:02:31
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