Guest Post- Nathan

Put A Cap On It: Millinery Evolution

By Nathan

I was at the shops yesterday, and a teenage boy lost his mum. I know he was a teenage boy because he was wearing a cap. It was not the cap itself that gave it away, it was the angle of its brim.

If I were Ben, this paragraph would be replaced with a diagram of a boy wearing a cap with its brim pointed to the sky.

I remember wearing a cap when I was a lad, I stopped when bucket hats became standard school fair (it was a bucket hat or a legionaries cap, and while practical they were the millinery equivalent of a mullet). When I wore caps the coolness of a cap wearer was directly proportional to the angle folded in the middle of the brim. Curves were cool, 90 degree folds were rebellious. This could be represented by a mathematical expression.

If I were Ben this would be figure 2.0, a frontal perspective of a hip teenage boy wearing a folded cap, with dotted lines to indicate different folds and levels of coolness.

Like all fashion cap brims are evolving to the point of stupidity. Fashion is an evolutionary aberration, an anomaly. While we become more complex and capable, it becomes stupider. There was a time, a couple of years ago, when a teenage friend informed me that cap brims were to be kept flat, on no account were they to be folded. Keeping the brand's sticker was grounds for further kudos. And so, a generation of cap wearers walked around looking like a highly evolved duck, with a brim for a beak. This, at the very least, maintained some semblance of practicality. A flat brim, at the right time of day, casts the optimal amount of shadow on one's features. They were, at one point, to be worn pointing in different directions. I'm not sure if the direction was determined by the position of the sun, but this would at least be practical.

The teenager I saw yesterday, lost in a shopping centre (he paged his mum over the loudspeaker - what a wimp), wore his brim flat, but tipped upwards at 45% (or higher, I must admit to not having carried my protractor with me). This is completely impractical from a sun safety perspective (unless you have a large nose and stand with the sun directly to your rear). It also looks dangerously silly. Perhaps it is a form of natural selection. Those who choose to wear their hats in such a manner will develop horrible sun spots, which will limit their ability to attract a partner and they will not reproduce.

So I say, teenager, if the cap fits. Wear it.