Attività

In the 1980s, New Era, the company that had supplied Major League Baseball for decades, started selling authentic team-branded hats to fans. Soon they were de rigueur. Tom Selleck’s character in “Magnum, P.I.,” set in Hawaii, wore a Tigers hat. You could see baseball hats on the cover of French Elle, in rap videos and atop the head of Princess Diana, whose occasional appearance in jeans and a baseball cap helped nurture her reputation as the “people’s princess”: It signaled approachability, even for a royal. And it worked for other luminaries as well. Steve Reich, a composer whose work has been played in some of the grandest halls in the world, and Paul Simon, one of the most successful pop musicians of the last 50 years, are both inseparable from rumpled, unbranded caps, even when they’re wearing black tie. No stuffy art-world or rock-star glamour here, the hats say. These are millionaires you could have a beer with.