Does the hat have a special lining toblock the concept of self awareness

September 20, 2021 11:09 AM

Please explain this aesthetic to me: the nerd who doesn't play by society's rules. They will wear a dark hat, often leather, akubra traveller style. Definitely carry at least one knife out on their belt. Big coat, also dark and usually leather. Think: Benny Watts in Queen's Gambit.

I see and know people in real life who dress like this, and have for many years across different parts of the US. It seems to be a uniform among a Certain Kind of Male Nerd, much in the way that a trilby + short sleeve button up signifies the Neckbeard archetype. The hat is always there. The knife is always there. They regurgitate a few sentences from a wikipedia article and then say things like "what can I say, I'm a nerd," or mention that something something kind of conflict would not have occurred if they had been there (with the implication that they would have, idk, crippled the opponent either with their intellect or their aforementioned knife). It is a uniform of I am a cool maverick among people who would almost never be mistaken for cool outside of their own bubble of like-dressed individuals. I have a coworker who dresses like this (we had to ask him to leave his knife at home) and I asked him once "so what's up with the hat" which he was wearing indoors and he replied "does not a man need a hat?"


Where did this aesthetic come from? What is the origin? Does the style have a name?

Was it really around back in the 60s or was Queen's Gambit using as a shorthand to show us what kind of guy Benny is? (I have seen this article which was not illuminating at all.)

If it really has been around for the last 60 years, how does it still have so much staying power to remain relatively unchanged? It was pervasive before the internet, so how was this look popularized? Who are/were the famous people who wore this style for people to emulate? Besides the recent Queen's Gambit, where else is this look in popular culture?

Is this YOUR personal style? How did you come to it?

posted by phunniemee to Grab Bag (50 answers total)

I have no answers for you, exactly - only Metafilter history:

Fedora guy

Subsequent discussion of Fedora Guy and related matters

A little Metatalk postscript on Fedora Guy
posted by penguin pie at 11:28 AM on September 20, 2021

hipster mallninja? I found it hard to believe that style was around at that time for Benny - it actually took me out of the show. But - IIRC, he lived in NYC - so, this may not have been so much of a "nerdy cosplay", but an actual urban hipster kind of look for the time.

But... there is always one. In my group of high-school RPG/table-top gaming nerds back in the early 90's, there were 2... That leather duster seems more of a "cowboy-thing" - bombers were more in fashion due to their utility with motorcycles.
posted by rozcakj at 11:30 AM on September 20, 2021

Debonair Sysadmin
posted by zamboni at 11:35 AM on September 20, 2021

Friends of mine who had this aesthetic would often refer to themselves as "trenchcoat mafia" or something similar. That more or less stopped after Columbine. If I were writing a cultural history of this style and mode, it would have an enormous rupture right there: before that external views might be negative (geeks!) but after that, especially in the immediate aftermath, the association with school shootings was extraordinarily strong.
posted by feckless at 11:38 AM on September 20, 2021

I knew a guy who wore a hat and coat like that in high school in the early 1970s. He wouldn't have had a knife in school - so I can't say if he had one. He was in my third-year German class - I think he hung out with the intellectual drug-using kids. I'm not sure if he would have called himself a nerd. Can't imagine him saying anything suggesting violence. I can't remember anyone else dressing like that in my high school of 2000 students. He was definitely identified as the guy with the hat. He had shoulder-length hair, but that was common. Mostly I'm popping in to say the clothes existed not long after The Queen's Gambit time period. This was a small city in Illinois.
posted by FencingGal at 11:42 AM on September 20, 2021

It's a way of presenting themselves as a tough guy. They don't actually know how to be a tough guy so they think adopting the aesthetic is all they have to do.
posted by bleep at 11:45 AM on September 20, 2021

I have zero scholarship to back this up but the look parallels a LOT of fashion choices in anime, and even to a lesser extent Western comic books, which are not short on varieties of space outlaw, future outlaw, outlaw robot bounty hunter, what have you.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:48 AM on September 20, 2021

In terms of sources for the visual style, there are many, but Sisters of Mercy / Mission UK and Tim Bradstreet's art for Vampire the Masquerade would be two major ones.
posted by feckless at 11:48 AM on September 20, 2021

I feel like Benny's costume looks more late sixties/early seventies and the leather coat looks wrong to me - too loose. That leather coat/vaguely western hat thing seems to me to sort of accrete around sixties fascination with/steroetyping of Native cultures and the west - if you watch the first part of Once Upon A Time In The West, which is fantastic, the look of the men at the shoot out is sort of Benny.

I dated a guy in high school who dressed a bit like that, but this was pre-Milady so the aesthetic was a bit different. My perception at the time was that this was a working class weirdo look - you could get the components fairly cheaply if you had a long dark coat instead of a leather one, and even a leather coat was more of a "I saved up and then I got my tax refund from my part-time job and I spent some of it on a Swans album and some of it on this coat" thing. Also you didn't need to live in a city with trendy boutiques - you could get a long black coat and black jeans and a black shirt and a vaguely western hat anywhere. Remember that this would be the eighties/nineties, so no internet shopping. And it was a look that was super consistent - you didn't need a lot of pieces, you could basically wear the same thing every day.

I don't think it was/is about looking "cool" precisely, it's either about looking like a fantasy in your head or looking weird enough that people won't mess with you, either because you're in a situation where you'd otherwise get messed with a lot or because you're insecure.

I freely admit that until the incel thing happened, I had a sort of soft spot for these guys because of the guy from high school, who was a sweetheart.
posted by Frowner at 11:51 AM on September 20, 2021

Yeah, I think late sixties cinema/Westerns> seventies hard rock/metal/counterculture> cyberpunk/Bladerunner >anime & Vampire The Masquerade...there's also a RenFest angle in here somewhere.
posted by Frowner at 11:54 AM on September 20, 2021

I dated a guy who wore such a hat and lots of black, in the early 70s. The look always seems an amalgam of Bogart, Private Eyes from old movies, cowboys, performative masculinity. In the 90s, the school dept. sysadmin rocked this look a swell as as a cultivated enigmatic refusal to explain anything at all; we called him The Cowboy and I used to hum Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire; my co-workers giggled. I have known other Sysadmins who wore some version.
posted by theora55 at 11:57 AM on September 20, 2021

None of this is exactly your guy, but I immediately thought of Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark, though here he is in a dark hat and dark leather jacket.

So, also, yeah, what We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese said about futuristic bounty hunter (also fits Ford's role in Bladerunner though not his clothing there). So a kind of rogue adventurer-type that also fancies himself as an intellectual? And one of the good guys?
posted by nanook at 11:57 AM on September 20, 2021

Honestly, it feels like self-esteem issues dovetailing with media exposure.

To follow on with Blast Hardcheese and feckless...this style came up a LOT in comics, books, and anime in the early to mid 90s and it was almost always used as visual shorthand to A Character Whose Power Was Underestimated.

And if your body doesn't quite fit the ideal of beauty and you don't really have the internet to find like-minded friends, then this became a very appealing outfit to transition towards. From what I recall in the 90s, taking this look on was a bit of a coming out, a bit of a glowing up. Folks who knew where the look came from would feel safe talking to you, and folks who didn't would ditch their preconceived notion of you. Or at least, that was the hope.

Neckbeard/incel/fedora-man co-opted this outfit in the late 2000s/early 10s. And with the decade-plus dominance of geek media in the commercial sphere, there's now a LOT of different options for nerdy kids who want to assemble their outward presentation, so this particular look remains the domain of that culture until a new character comes along and re-embodies and redefines it.
posted by greenland at 12:00 PM on September 20, 2021

I knew a guy that dressed like this for a while in the early 90s, and he was sort of Goth-turned-Knitters fan. I think we may have referred to him as "Crocodile Dundee: Near Dark" and he was the kind of guy that used to hover at tables of girls at the local punk rock/weirdo coffeeshop and try to pick up girls by asking if we were into Tori Amos. Eventually he went to art school and shaved his head and got into Thrill Jockey and was a different flavor of intolerable until he moved to Berlin or whatever.
posted by thivaia at 12:05 PM on September 20, 2021

My frame of reference is as a tween and teen of the 80s, where I always read it as a visual indicator that I Am A Man Of Mystery And Great Depth And Sorrow And Maybe Crimes (Committing or Solving).

And like a lot of youth fashion, it was as much about who you were not - not a jock or prep, not a skater (though Skater Formal/Winter also skewed in the trenchcoat direction, but different hats), not really a goth or metalhead but there was music overlap on the obscurer ends, too "cool" to be a nerd.

That Guy was definitely on the same continuum as That Guy from the 70s, but then the 70s That Guy aesthetic was what informed films like Blade Runner and a lot of Noir NY Futurism and some of the fashion and headgear echoed in New Romantic and New Wave style which then also showed up in the music videos of the early MTV era and changed the fashion landscape in some ways among your average hat guy.
posted by Lyn Never at 12:15 PM on September 20, 2021

I had a friend-of-a-friend in the 1980s like this. He also wore sunglasses and fingerless gloves 24/7. He was into D&D as well. He reminded me of Curtis Armstrong's characters in Risky Business and Better Off Dead. I would bet money that he also smoked a pipe.

So there's one data point. This guy existed in the mid-1980s.

Edit: HAHAHAHA I just googled him and found a current-day picture of him and the dude is wearing a fedora.
posted by bondcliff at 12:18 PM on September 20, 2021

I believe the kind of guy is “1980s goth”
posted by rodlymight at 12:32 PM on September 20, 2021

When I was in high school, late 70's, a lot of people, including myself, wore their father's old Army shirts as jackets. Since this is earlier, I would think this young man may have found his grandfather's old hat in a closet, and was maybe trying to emulate Humphrey Bogart/James Dean/Marlon Brando/Hemingway, and would have a well-worn copy of "On the Road" in his collection of reading materials.
posted by Marie Mon Dieu at 12:36 PM on September 20, 2021

It was pervasive before the internet, so how was this look popularized?

Sci-fi/gaming cons, I would think.
posted by soundguy99 at 12:48 PM on September 20, 2021

During my brief fedora wearing period, I got it from the Indiana Jones films because I thought he was cool and I liked the hat. I thought that the hat would help with the fact that I was incredibly socially awkward, shy, depressed and angry.

It didn’t.

I still am that same nerdy, shy, depressed, angry person, but I’ve learned to accept that’s just how it is and now I wear whatever hat I want to.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 1:18 PM on September 20, 2021

I am with Bondcliff, albeit I was in the Midwest during those years.

I freely admit that I was given a fedora (from Banana Republic!) in high school. One of my sons recently found it in my closet and asked if he could wear it, and I quickly said "Certainly not" because I don't want him to be pilloried.

To a teen-age guy who isn't a jock, it says maybe "classy" or "better dressed than those guys in hockey sweaters and letter jackets" or "I can now respectfully tip my cap to a lady" or "I don't have to wear what everyone else wears," and maybe other things.

When you're trying to figure out who you are, experimenting with how you look is a big deal.

(Those leather "duster" raincoats, though -- I want to blame goddamn J. Peterman for those, but I don't think they ever did the leather ones. Ugh.)
posted by wenestvedt at 1:20 PM on September 20, 2021

It was pervasive before the internet, so how was this look popularized?

We did still have television/film/print media, and people in the Olden Times often congregated and perambulated around an outdated form of public-commercial architecture called a shop-ping mall, plus there were concerts and cons and high school hallways. Fashion didn't move quite as fast, but everyone watched pretty much the same television and movies so that was a really common vector, and then certainly this particular flavor of attire was something you'd see in magazine photos of bands, writers, the celebrities of RPGs and similar games.

But it was, like I say, also in some sense a fashion of elimination: it wasn't made up of exactly the same clothes other kids were wearing, but it was a combo of stuff you could get in any JC Penney or Dillard's, plus accessories at the mall ninja store. Young people, especially men, were largely targeted a narrowish selection of clothing to choose from, and often the hat guys would shop from the next section over with slightly more boring clothing for office dads and old guys who didn't wear suits anymore.

Weirdly, I do always remember that there was clearly some kind of hard capacity limit in any social group, though: hat guys didn't roam in packs of little Spy Guys, so either he was a loner or he was the hat guy in a group of either nerds or a mixed bag of misfits, presumably the Alpha Nerd since he was the one who got to lean all the way in. I am thinking of my personal hat guy from high school, who kinda ran stealth with a tweed cap and probably no ninja weapons though I know he had nunchuks at home, and his crew was Punk Guy, Floppy Hair Poet, Nerd (whose mom wouldn't let him have fashion but was actually pretty cool), and then he himself did not skate but he would hang with the skaters sometimes. (He is now in law enforcement.) I think there was another hat guy who ran more with the stoners and metalheads, and as far as I know he and my friend could not acknowledge each others' existence or it would tear the space-time continuum.

Proof of this theory: someone tried to invoke Andrew Eldritch of Sisters of Mercy as "80s Goth" but the thing was, Eldritch got to it first. You would have to be willing to fight him to the death to use that look.
posted by Lyn Never at 1:28 PM on September 20, 2021

Take away the hat and the knife and you have a heavy-metal stoner uniform for the white, very-very-very-lower-middle class son of the Midwestern 80s and 90s. I admit that they add nuance/change the dating, but the fundamental look is...yeah...one of my cousins. Or the kids at 0:13 of this clip from Heathers.
posted by praemunire at 1:58 PM on September 20, 2021

But it was, like I say, also in some sense a fashion of elimination: it wasn't made up of exactly the same clothes other kids were wearing, but it was a combo of stuff you could get in any JC Penney or Dillard's, plus accessories at the mall ninja store.

Also, in the late 60s/early 70s, shopping at thrift stores became a cool thing instead of something you did because you were poor. I remember one of the fashion magazines I read in the 70s featured looks from the 40s (though my mom said that no one in the 40s would have worn two different prints together), so there was some nostalgia going on. I wore some of my mom's and aunt's old 40s clothes in high school. When The Great Gatsby came out in 1974, there was definitely some accompanying hat wearing by young men. But that was a different kind of hat. I'd forgotten about that.
posted by FencingGal at 2:07 PM on September 20, 2021

It's too bad about the fedora. I (a woman) wore a fedora in the early 2000s and often got compliments on the street on it, but the associations have become overwhelming.
posted by praemunire at 2:13 PM on September 20, 2021

Heh, I knew this guy in late-'90s Texas high school, and we called him Desperado and sang it when he came our way. Perfectly nice guy, just looked completely out of place and time.
posted by fiercecupcake at 3:07 PM on September 20, 2021

While idly Googling "trenchcoat and fedora" I stumbled on a comment from a Redditor on the question of "Why did trench coats become a neckbeard thing?" that strikes me as pretty insightful:

"The trenchcoat shows up throughout decades of material that would be appealing to social outcasts. Think of all those lone-wolf private detectives. The character Rorschach in the graphic novel Watchmen. Characters who were lonely and cynical but kinda self-righteous and whatever. The same badasses who'd wear fedoras in movies too."

Which is to say this may be less of a continuous defined style and more of a cyclical thing where - echoing Frowner & Blast Hardcheese - male social outcasts who desire to appear, well, more confident and "masculine" (for certain values of "masculine") than they feel pick up a version of the look from tough guys in media; private dicks in the 30's-50's; spaghetti western cowboy heroic outlaw gunslingers in the 60's & 70's; Indiana Jones, Blade Runner, cyberpunk, A Better Tomorrow, in the 80's & 90's; anime & comic books (themselves often a melange of bits & pieces of costuming and looks pulled from other media) & The Matrix in the 2000's; and adopt it for themselves.

And because pop media has a tendency to eat itself and recycle and regurgitate (and steal), the style itself waxes and wanes, but there's always somebody who's gonna magpie the look from whatever media they grab hold of - the Benny costume does look anachronistic to me, but it's plausible that the 60's NYC-based Benny would have picked up the leather trenchcoat for actual outerwear reasons and added the hat as "outlaw" signaling (within the very, uh, sedate context of "chess outlaw") due to various Westerns. While the guy you knew in high school who looked like that grabbed it from Darkman and Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, and the guy at your job is (in his own head) referencing The Matrix and some anime and a guy he saw dressed like that at ComicCon.
posted by soundguy99 at 3:08 PM on September 20, 2021

I love the answers here, lots of great context, and I just thought I'd add that the specific coworker who dresses like this (we actually have three of them, different ages, in different parts of the country!) who I asked re. his Crocodile Dundee hat is in his 50s.

It's just incredible to me that this extremely particular almost cookie cutter style choice cuts across such a wide range of time and location but the men are nearly interchangeable.

lol forever at debonair sysadmin
posted by phunniemee at 3:42 PM on September 20, 2021

I am reminded of the Exactitudes project, although I don't see this type there. Must not have made it to Europe.
posted by adamrice at 4:59 PM on September 20, 2021

I once bought one of those oilcloth cowboy raincoats for reasons and wore it on a plane. I learned that smaller commuter flights can get a bit warm inside and then I learned that oilcloth can get a bit smelly. Not horrible, but definitely noticeable.

For some dumb reason, I thought it would be cool to do up the ankle straps, but when the plane landed, I realized, shit, no jetway.

I had to walk across really windy, cold tarmac with that coat on, ankle strapped, and it turned into a goddamn parachute. I’m sure the other passengers were laughing at that dumbass with a drag chute on.

Eventually, it lived in the bottom of an old army trunk until the end of its days.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 5:28 PM on September 20, 2021

I dated this guy in college. We called the type SPAM... sensitive ponytail wearing new age man.

At the time they mostly had ponytails with their leather or oilcloth dusters.
posted by esoteric things at 5:49 PM on September 20, 2021

I still love my badass longcoat as e 40 year old trans woman, so I'm not sure what that says. Oh well. But yeah, lots of heroes or antiheroes in cool coats, comics, war movies, and stories
posted by Jacen at 5:58 PM on September 20, 2021

> it was a combo of stuff you could get in any JC Penney or Dillard's, plus accessories at the mall ninja store.

I have been informed by a teenager I had on hand that they are now (still?) called "Mall Ninjas."
posted by The corpse in the library at 8:07 PM on September 20, 2021

> I dated this guy in college. We called the type SPAM... sensitive ponytail wearing new age man.

At the time they mostly had ponytails with their leather or oilcloth dusters.

Huh! I remember SNAGS -- sensitive New Age guys -- but they wouldn't've had the knife, hat, or coat. A quite different group.
posted by The corpse in the library at 8:09 PM on September 20, 2021

Harry Dresden, Chicago's professional wizard, also sports such a look.
posted by a humble nudibranch at 9:08 PM on September 20, 2021

Friends of mine who had this aesthetic would often refer to themselves as "trenchcoat mafia" or something similar. That more or less stopped after Columbine.

I knew guys who dressed like this in high school and college - they were just their own brand of nerds and I had no basis on which to judge them. But absolutely, after Columbine, anyone who dresses like that presents more as school shooter and less like harmless nerd.
posted by bendy at 9:08 PM on September 20, 2021

When I knew these guys, in the 70s, my sense was they were trying to project that their particular variety of nerditry was actually cool, but only other similarly insightful badasses could see it. That enabled them to preemptively and self protectively reject the rejectors. They also covered fear of intimate relationships this way.
posted by carmicha at 10:23 PM on September 20, 2021

Knives are really huge right now and seem only to be getting bigger by the day.

I tried to help my business partner find a pocket knife for her husband, and since then my YouTube homepage features multiple videos from 4-5 knife channels a day, and new channels appear frequently.

Here is a representative video from the channel I think is the best (as well as the least problematic), in which DCA (his initials) reviews 15 or so knives from a multitude of manufacturers in response to viewer questions. The most expensive knife is a 'kitchen folder' which sells for $450+. One of the knives is a copy in modern materials of a Roman knife found in a London archaeological dig. I tried and failed to keep track of the profusion of steels and their properties that this relative handful of knives is made from. The last question is from a viewer who owns 80 knives, 40 folding and 40 fixed blade, and asks if he has 'a problem'. DCA teases him that these are "rookie numbers" and that his problem is he doesn’t have enough knives. A number of commenters confess to collections in excess of 300 and 400 knives.
posted by jamjam at 2:17 AM on September 21, 2021

A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.

The only men who should be allowed to wear hats are Greek fisherman and baseball players.
~~ P. J. O’Rourke
posted by dancestoblue at 4:54 AM on September 21, 2021

As much as I liked P.J. O'Rourke in the 1980s, my loyalty has since pivoted to the CDC: "For the most protection, wear a hat that has a brim all the way around that shades your face, ears, and the back of your neck."

Here's a good, readable explainer piece about the gender gap in skin cancers:

In skin cancer statistics, there’s a striking gender gap. Though more people are diagnosed with skin cancer each year in the U.S. than all other cancers combined, there are a disproportionate number of men in those statistics. That includes melanoma, the most dangerous of the three most common types of skin cancer.

...

“It’s way more common to see nonmelanoma skin cancer on the scalp and ears of men than women,” she says....

“Men, over their lifetime, probably get a lot more unprotected sun exposure,” she explains. The solution is better sun protection, including using sunscreen and wearing hats, especially over thinning hair

cite

Now I am almost fifty and my hair went the way of the dodo, so I wear a hat with a big brim all the way around: a canvas boonie hat if I am getting filthy doing yardwork, or a soft Akubra felt hat if I can stay clean.

I know this is a tangent to the original question, but -- dare I say it -- Not Every Hat is being worn by a guy you don't like. :7) Sneer, but I am saving my ears.
posted by wenestvedt at 6:09 AM on September 21, 2021

> hipster mallninja? I found it hard to believe that style was around at that time for Benny - it actually took me out of the show

Really? I just assumed that, as all hipsters of all kinds aspire to, Benny did it before it was cool.

I think Lyn Never has hit the nail on the head about what this look signifies to nerdy men:

Weirdly, I do always remember that there was clearly some kind of hard capacity limit in any social group, though: hat guys didn't roam in packs of little Spy Guys, so either he was a loner or he was the hat guy in a group of either nerds or a mixed bag of misfits, presumably the Alpha Nerd since he was the one who got to lean all the way in.

This is, very specifically, a loner/alpha thing. It's a way to turn around the fact that these guys don't have a lot of close real-world relationships, by casting themselves as what TV Tropes calls The Drifter. They're the lone gunman who drifts from town to town. The misunderstood tragic hero with a dark past but a heart of gold. The protagonist of a hundred different animes, comics, movies, TV shows.

Even if you go to a convention with dozens of these dudes, they will all keep a sort of careful distance from each other, because their comfort zone is really being that One Guy who rocks this look in their town, school or social group.
posted by automatronic at 6:20 AM on September 21, 2021

They're the lone gunman who drifts from town to town. The misunderstood tragic hero with a dark past but a heart of gold. The protagonist of a hundred different animes, comics, movies, TV shows.

Those lines are best read aloud by Clint Eastwood. (Well, the first two, at least.) :7)
posted by wenestvedt at 6:49 AM on September 21, 2021

They're the lone gunman who drifts from town to town. The misunderstood tragic hero with a dark past but a heart of gold. The protagonist of a hundred different animes, comics, movies, TV shows.

This. It's a performative masculinity (of a very narrow definition of "masculinity") that in my experience meeting them, always seems to come from a position of insecurity.

I can remember a couple of guys in high school in the 1980s dressing this way (minus the knives, that is a trend that arrived more recently), the same in college, and until last year I had a coworker in his late 40s who dressed in this outfit. There's a homeless or homeless-adjacent guy I see around town who does this, with not one but two very large knives.

Based just on my anecdotal experience, these guys always own (and display) swords and/or battleaxes at home, too.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:31 AM on September 21, 2021

by casting themselves as what TV Tropes calls The Drifter. They're the lone gunman who drifts from town to town. The misunderstood tragic hero with a dark past but a heart of gold. The protagonist of a hundred different animes, comics, movies, TV shows.

Exactly.

For these characters their outsider status is inextricably intertwined with their heroism and moral code - the drifter lone gunman is willing to kill to protect the innocent townspeople, but it's his very willingness to kill that prevents him from ever settling in the town and integrating into the local society; the private eye is willing to lie, cheat, break into buildings, take a beating from thugs, and refuse to cooperate with the cops in order to protect his client and ensure that justice is served (and it's likely that he considers the "official" justice of laws and courts insufficient at best); the space bounty hunter goes after bad guys but can't do it within the ruleset and constraints of the official authority's structure; Indiana Jones spends his time dodging deadly booby traps to reach the archaeological treasure, rather than going the acceptable standard route of brushing dirt off things with a toothbrush.

So IMO, it's often understandable, on some level, that men & boys who already feel like outsiders and are searching for definitions and examples of masculinity will latch on to these characters, the outsiders and outcasts whose heroism is defined by their outsider status. And for some of them latching on involves costuming. Thus the trench coats and dusters and fedoras.

The wrinkle, of course, is that clothes often don't make the man.
posted by soundguy99 at 7:58 AM on September 21, 2021

I'm not a dude, but years ago I owned a purple trench coat, and then I upgraded to a purple leather trench coat. Purple. Leather. Trench. Coat. I would still be wearing it if it hadn't been stolen. Did I look like a superspy or assassin? No. Did I look like the offspring of GK Chesterton and a grape? Yes. Did the dry cleaner simply put the coat out of its misery and lie about the 'other customer'? A full investigation is required.

Sometimes self-delusion is a survival skill. If you can't be Indiana Jones, you may as well feel like him when you go to Starbucks even if you look silly.

They regurgitate a few sentences from a wikipedia article and then say things like "what can I say, I'm a nerd," or mention that something something kind of conflict would not have occurred if they had been there (with the implication that they would have, idk, crippled the opponent either with their intellect or their aforementioned knife).

That's like 50% of Metafilter and if you add the word podcast, it rises to 98%. Not anyone here, of course.
posted by betweenthebars at 11:13 AM on September 21, 2021

That's like 50% of Metafilter and if you add the word podcast, it rises to 98%. Not anyone here, of course.

I like to believe the no doubt vast debonair sysadmin mefite contingent has been typing comments into this thread and deleting them for the past 24 hours trying to craft a response without outing themselves.


I know this is a tangent to the original question, but -- dare I say it -- Not Every Hat is being worn by a guy you don't like. :7)
Or is in denial. (I kid, wenestvedt, I kid.)
posted by phunniemee at 11:20 AM on September 21, 2021

I think Benny's getup in the show is a little bit of an anachronism, but also note that in the 1960s there's also plenty of "freaks" who could wear any random thing, so it's not impossible.

Long coat + fedora as a non-mainstream male youth style starts to naturally occur in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It's a bit of a Lit-Punk thing, like William Burroughs.
posted by ovvl at 2:01 PM on September 21, 2021

Welcome to The Fedora Lounge.
posted by einekleine at 3:13 PM on September 21, 2021

I like to believe the no doubt vast debonair sysadmin mefite contingent

Okay, so I only just got here. Sorry, things have been hectic at work lately. Anyway, I made some vaguely debonair sysadmin aesthetic choices somewhere in the early-mid 90s, although perhaps with at least an inkling of self-awareness. I never was much of a clotheshorse so my commitment to any kind of distinct appearance was tenuous at best, but yeah, this was definitely a thing in UNIX sysadmin circles in the Bay Area for a while among the younger multimedia gulch contingent. This may or may not be due to the level of overlap between that crowd and the more general goth-industrial club crowd at the time, but that's at least my hypothesis.

I'd already given up on mall ninja shit by that point in my life, though.

^{a couple of years later I was a bank executive in a suit, so...}
posted by majick at 3:31 PM on September 21, 2021

I dunno, I can't be mad at people who dress for lives more mysterious and exciting than they have. Incels and peacocking-hat guys, sure, that's gross, but if all we're talking is that some guy with a bland computer job to pay the rent wishes he had a life that was more meaningful and interesting than, like, installing Adobe updates for people, I can't feel scornful about that. Prior to the incels and gamergate, I was always happy to see those guys. Sure, a lot of them were awkward weirdos, but I prefer awkward weirdos to people who have been rationalized into professional capitalism.

And before we get to the "but I knew this guy who looked weird AND was creepy to girls", well, I have known guys with perfectly appropriate demeanor, popular, handsome and well-dressed, who were creepy to girls. Indeed, the guys who have been creepy and sometimes dangerous to me have been perfectly regular straight football hero types.

On that note: I grew up in a really conservative and class-divided suburb before the internet. It was a suburb straight out of an eighties teen movie - the jocks really did harass everyone else, the teachers really were enthusiastic participants in bullying the weirdos, people got made fun of for being poor all the time, etc. The "cheap black clothes and a hat" uniform was in fact a way for working class kids to signal "I'm weird but I'm not a clueless victim, if you bother me I will do something unpredictable that could hurt or embarrass you".

Looking like a weirdo can be as effective as looking actually dangerous in a lot of circumstances, because people fear embarrassment and inconvenience almost as much as violence. A lot of people will leave you alone if you look weird - you don't have to look powerful or intimidatingly cool. And my sense of a lot of hat-wearers is that being left alone is the critical part.

We tend to assume that the desire to keep other people from messing with you is born of insecurity, gender problems, etc, but it's pretty often born out of having been messed with a lot. I think that for people who had broadly normal, broadly secure adolescences it's easy to underestimate the violence and cruelty that some people experience.

In short, I do not mind the hats.
posted by Frowner at 4:55 PM on September 21, 2021