American men do not wear hats the way they used to, when headgear was considered as necessary as shoes. Hatless has become proper on formal and social occasions. But when did the trend begin?
One popular assumption is that American men stopped wearing hats after John F. Kennedy didn't wear a hat to his inaugural in 1961. But it's not necessarily so, as author Neil Steinberg tells NPR's Scott Simon.
Steinberg, a Chicago Sun-Times columnist, gets to the bottom of the debate over lids with his book Hatless Jack: The President, the Fedora and the History of an American Style.
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