🟧 Head games, Part 1
The stories behind our niche baseball caps
Nate Gallant: Sometimes, you just want a little cover. Or you don’t feel like your hair is your best accessory. But few pieces of fashion risk overstating one’s commitments more than a baseball cap, which reduces fashion to pure identification, like the flag of a pirate ship. Perhaps this is a result of the baseball cap’s design origins, which have never lost the strength of sports fandom’s metonymies of color and logo, perched on the head, the supposed seat of human rationality. Lately the cap has also been an unwitting surface for the new iconography of fascism with a cheaply stitched red slogan.
Still, any baseball cap wearer knows that they take on lives and histories of their own. Like a niche tote bag, you pick one up somewhere and adopt it into your life, either to signal something or to be fun, to be trendy or to intentionally look like a suburban dad. It could be frivolous or ironic, or everything all at once. For this series, we’ll analyze our own cap collections hat by hat. If you have a collection you want to highlight, send us a note by replying or emailing onethingnewsletter@gmail.com.
The Swamp Monster
I showed up to dinner at a friend’s house the other night and was immediately handed the above hat, and cannot overstate my affection for what he described as the Swamp Monster, a creature native to Washington, DC. The off-green-blue color palette is perfect. The friend in question, Ari Brown (@arifromtheblock.1) is a very smart human and general man about DC, and happens to also be a talented artist.
A hat always risks over-determination. It can, at times, attempt to communicate simple, clean, almost arbitrary identification — a sense of team — with something stupidly and impossibly complicated. But the Swamp Monster is a species native to the inevitable muck of our town. Its environs are unfixable. You can neither build on them nor destroy them. There is no drain, only spigots. Whatever you destroy or add to the swamp only stirs, thickens, and spices the very un-ancient but equally indomitable stew. There is thus only murk.One does not identify with the monster; it is merely our neighbor, and we must live with it.
The Swamp Monster is for sale again soon. DM Ari for details.
Inverted Yankees hat
Why is the blue Yankees hat a nigh-universal accessory of the fashionable and the sporty? The navy blue and white NY logo seems to have wrought some common space of significance that few other pieces of branded merchandise have ever achieved. I’ve found it equally ubiquitous among trendily dressed people from Paris to Tokyo to Beijing. Of course on the international stage it signifies the soft power of the United States broadly, and New York City’s special place within it. I see the hat in Premier League and Serie A stadiums, seemingly symbolizing roughly “sports fan” and looking quite nice on a wide variety of heads and faces.
Sometimes, though, a fake exceeds the original. When I saw someone wearing this inverted version of the Yankees logo in China, I could not help but to seek out and buy myself a version. Ubiquity breeds not just annoying repetition, but the transformations of imitation, satire, permutation. Now that dupes of fashion staples are themselves so ubiquitous, to varying degrees of obviousness, they have become an artform unto themselves. (See shanzhai culture and last-decade Balenciaga.) Yet it takes something special, or perhaps even accidental, to so fully and cleanly remix such a straightforward symbol as the Yankees logo.
Defunct baker swag
Can one belong to a community through smaller, more intimate forms of consumption? This is the gambit of many platforms and consumer networks, maybe even the tacit hope of One Thing. The case is weakened, made to feel even more hipster-ish and inauthentic once the pillar of that network of consumption, in this case, a genius baker, decides to close up shop, and your bread plug is gone and all you’re left with is vaguely unintelligible swag.
Velvel Breads was a CSA-style bakery that distributed from the front porches of friends of the owner around DC and Maryland. The baking was the labor of one Hannah Wolfman-Arent, formerly of Sonny’s in Shaw and baker of the best sourdough boules and rye brownies I have ever consumed. She also made the only good challah and bagels in DC. However she closed up shop last year, to the dismay of her many dedicated fans.
Since I can no longer get this bread, I had to settle for the hat, purchased at a farewell party for Hannah in Columbia Heights where the business’s baking equipment and leftover flour was for sale and plastic tupperwares of excess flaxseed were available to take for free. I look terrible in yellow and maybe thirty people in DC will know what the hat means, but the wolf is cute. And it reminded me of another woman-owned, lupine-themed confectionery, She Wolf Bakery, which deals glutenous delight to me primarily at the Union Square farmer’s market in NYC. Rare things are rare, and part of me likes that something not quite niche but still small and excessive is on something as banal as a hat with a logo I literally stamp on my dumb head.
BONUS: For those who want to terrify themselves or their neighbors, or frustrate the street art buffs of DC who might be looking into your window for the puzzlingly ubiquitous white marble busts in windows of the city’s Northwest, the glowing head lamp modeling Nate’s hats can be found here.
Best of OT Fashion:
Fashion is an ongoing concern of One Thing. If you have an item you want us to research, just hit reply or email onethingnewsletter@gmail.com.
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