(Second in a series. You’re invited to subscribe via email. Perhaps my experiences will give you some ideas and be helpful in some way.)

In our family home during my childhood the back door opened into the kitchen.

Just inside, in the corner by the door, was a tall chrome hat rack.

My father always kept at least three hats on it: his “every day” hat, and two “Sunday” hats–one dark and one lighter colored.  During the seasons, he rotated straw for felt.

My dad was a hat man.

By the time I entered kindergarten, there were several baseball caps and at least one kid sized cowboy hat present.

His son was a cap kid.

Over time, the cap kid became a hat man, too. 

I still wear caps for golf.  Sometimes, a wide brimmed straw hat if the wind isn’t too bad. 

The assortment of hats in my wardrobe has grown over time. (I’m reluctant to call it a “collection” as the word implies the items won’t be used often.  Every hat in my assortment is in the rotation. 

The decision of which hat to wear isn’t always easy in Texas Hill Country. A warm weather hat, straw, is appropriate and necessary about ten months out of the year. In the last four years I have purchased some custom hats and they tend to get more wear than others in the rotation. 

Retirement brought me to Texas from the mountains of western North Carolina where felt hats were the choice for four or five months annually and it’s a struggle now to get them all worn every year.

To compliment the hat and tie them into the ensemble more effectively, a variety of hat bands and feathers are kept handy.

Hat etiquette is a good topic for another article, however, it’s noteworthy to state now that wearing a cap backwards, or in any direction with a suit, is anathema to me. Few sartorial faux pauses are worse. 

On one of our trips to buy my father a new hat, I wore an Alpine hat my cousin had sent me from Germany.  The hat salesman taught me how to wear it. He said, “Tilt it down on the side until it barely touches the top of your ear, and tilt it forward to just above your eyebrow.”  I still wear my hats that way decades later. My posts online often get comments about the rakish tilt. Many consider it to be stylishly confident, and I agree. 

I wear a hat or cap every day now. If I ever walked out of the house without a hat, well, that would be something I could never explain.