Baseball Caps, With and Without Tailoring
By: Eric Langlois
Baseball is rooted in strong traditions, possibly more so than any other major sport. You can see this from the uniforms, which almost always include a belt and more often than not knee breeches and long socks or stockings. To me this is part of the charm of baseball, a firmly old-fashioned sport that still continues to modify itself while retaining a strong sense of tradition. But one of the most prominent cultural products of baseball is also so ubiquitous as to be unnoticeable. Like blue jeans or the leather flight jacket, the baseball cap is a mainstay of American fashion, and America’s cultural output worldwide.
In 1860, the Brooklyn Excelsiors began wearing a cap which had a crown made of six panels that came together at the top with a button. To a modern eye, this would look similar to a flat cap or a fisherman’s cap. Over the course of the 19th century, this design took cues from the pillbox style cap, which had stiffer, straight up and down sides and a flat top, and the crown of the cap shrank into a familiar, fairly form-fitting shape. The baseball cap was born.
The baseball cap differs from the mechanic’s cap or cyclist’s cap in that it has a longer peak or bill, to guard from the sun. A workman wants a short-billed cap which will not get in the way in cramped spaces or with close-in work, and a cyclist is more concerned with wind resistance than sun protection. Baseball players, on the other hand, spend hours of the sunniest season of the year standing out in a field with no shade, so the bills on baseball caps grew longer during the first half of the 20th century. Originally, these bills were stiffened with canvas or other layered material and given lines of reinforcing stitching to help preserve the shape. Following the second world war, hard rubber or plastic began to be used to form the structure of the brim, and continue to be used today.
The traditional baseball cap design features a buckram liner in the front two panels of the cap. Usually made of cotton, linen, or horsehair, this liner stiffens the front of the cap for a more uniform shape, which can help prominently feature any team logo or patch that is attached at the front. The modern baseball cap also takes the form of the low-profile “dad cap”, which sits close to the head and lacks the stiffening panels in the front. The dad cap tends to have a pre-bent brim, rather than the relatively flat brim of the traditional baseball cap.
Wearing ballcaps with tailoring is a point of contention for menswear traditionalists, who argue that it contrasts with (the more dramatic would say “besmirches”) the formality or dignity of tailored clothing. The suit is one of the more formal garments that your average man owns and wears these days. By choosing to wear a casual piece of sportswear, the feeling of formality and uniformness provided by a suit is broken. They would say that it is better to wear a more traditional piece of headwear with a suit to preserve the image that the suit is supposed to convey. As you might have guessed, I disagree and believe that there are plenty of arguments for wearing a baseball cap with tailoring.
One is practicality. Plenty of us want to cover our heads, whether from the rain or the sun, and almost everyone owns a baseball cap. On a rainy day, a bucket hat is perfectly acceptable to wear with a suit and raincoat to keep your head dry. In winter, only the most die-hard traditionalists would argue that you shouldn’t wear a knit hat with tailoring, bowing to the practical considerations that would drive you to wear a casual winter hat with a suit. It’s hard to argue that bucket hats and knit caps are more formal in nature than a ballcap. And if you’re using the cap as outerwear, removing it if you enter an office or a nice restaurant, I don’t see a point for complaint.
The other argument is simply style. The contrast between the dressiness of the suit and that sporty-casual nature of the ballcap is part of the fun. Brands like Aime Leon Dore and even the venerable J. Press have been pairing ballcaps with sleek suits or burly tweeds, tying in the dressed-down nature classic American sportswear with the dressed-up nature of traditional tailoring.
For years, plenty of people have been doom-saying about the death of the suit, while others have been finding different ways to wear them. A suit has gone from an obligation, something you have to wear, to something that people wear because they want to wear them, and they want to wear them because they’ve found the fun in it. For some people, then fun is in impeccably adhering to traditional rules of formality, while for others it’s tweaking and bending those rules by wearing suits differently, and with different things. A baseball cap with a worsted suit challenges tradition, but it keeps the suit in play, and for me that makes it a home run.
