Thursday, January 6, 2011

Winter hats, form or function

Did your mother ever nag you incessantly through fall and into winter to wear your hat every time the temperature went below fifty? It was always one of those ugly, practical, high function, warm hats, too. Yikes, how well I remember those days when function trumped form. I always managed to get out of the house with a squashable hat because it just wasn't "cool" to wear a hat around the other kids.

For me “form” was more important than function. Only weird, uncool kids wore hats. As soon as I got a few houses away from home, I would take the hat off, squash it as much as possible and jam it deep into my pocket. It seems the colder it got, the more defiant I became until by January, my hat barely made it outside before I squashed it into my pocket. By February, it never left my bedroom. After all, I was twelve, and I knew I could take it.

Now, it's cool to wear hats. We wear them in the summer as well as winter. For many, form still trumps function. For me, I go for function, especially when it gets brutally cold, but before I would wear one of these Manhattan street vendor’s hats, I think I would just stay inside.

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