Once the preferred headgear of burglars, ski instructors, the Smurfs and Michael Nesmith of the Monkees, the stocking cap has tiptoed into ranks dominated for the last decade by the baseball cap and do-rags.
For those who don’t know, do-rags are what guys call the scarves that mothers used to wear back in the 1950s, but “do-rag” sounds better.
And baseball caps are baseball caps, except to those who wear them sideways, so we can’t figure out where they’re coming from.
But for many kids, stocking caps used to be nerd crowns, especially for boys. It was the mark of a kid who did what his mother told him to do. Real-deal guys went naked-headed and froze their back-ends off.
The only thing worse than a stocking cap was a hood, which is aerodynamic in the wrong direction, as if meant to catch the cruel north wind. The guy who invented that must have laughed all the way to Palm Beach.
More mature people of the upper Midwest know stocking caps as a necessary evil for those who prefer to keep their ears for another season, bracing them against frostbite.
But the stocking cap, the nerdy stocking cap, is now high fashion.
In California, where temperatures often plunge into the 70s, they have become a huge fashion accent and among the preferred means of cool disguise.
Observers see them up and down the state, a place that couldn’t even pretend to know what kind of weather would really require such a garment.
Of course, they’re everywhere in Chicago in winter, but they’re also everywhere in Chicago in summer. They’re even showing up on fashion runways in Milan, in at least one case with a veil. That would look great on a bride, eh?
Though no one has yet declared the “Age of the Stocking Cap,” the day is coming.
A firm called OUNK New York boasts that “everybody who is anybody” wears its ski caps, another cool term for the stocking cap. “Anybody” would include singer/actress Brandy, producer/rap artist P. Diddy and pro basketball player Keith Van Horn, the company says.
The Fubu clothing company owes its birth a decade ago to a stocking cap, when one of its founders took a cue from a music video and decided he could produce these cappers of style with three other friends. It worked. The company has made its founders rich.
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And we haven’t confirmed this with doctors, but some young people in California insist that there is a sober matter of function to this rising element of style: If one wears a stocking cap, less clothing coverage is needed down below.
That would explain why, for example, actress Tara Reid showed up at a recent Sony PlayStation party with a stocking cap and bare midriff that was more like a real-lowriff.
The warming qualities of the cap were preventing the heat from escaping from her head, thus keeping her bare abdomen warm.
The girls populating Chicago area malls would do well to note this. Even if it’s 15 degrees out, they often can be seen dashing from the car at curbside to the mall door without benefit of coat. That way, they can look really cool in the mall. But if they simply wear the stocking cap, they wouldn’t have to run to the mall door, and their bare midriffs still wouldn’t ice over.
For a little perspective on this style, let’s turn to Gwendolyn Lewis Huddleston, academic director of the fashion-design degree program for the Art Institute of California at San Francisco. She also can explain why this one-time emblem of geekdom in the Midwest is such a cool thing on the West Coast.
Lewis Huddleston, 45, said she started wearing a stocking cap for reasons other than warmth during her high school days in the San Fernando Valley, where she credited the Hispanic population with popularizing the look.
“A lot of it was about that coolness,” she said. “You could pull it down over your eyes to disguise yourself. It’s an inexpensive fashion that comes from the streets. It could defy anything. If it got wet, so what? It doesn’t blow off your head in the wind.”
But it also provided a kind of security and visual protection.
“If people weren’t happy with their hair, they could cover it up. That inexpensive fashion item adds more of that cold-weather look. It’s quite that fashion fad. You’re seeing it in all the window displays. It’s really cool to wear nice clothes and then wear a stocking cap.”
In this way it becomes an element of a protest, an “anti” thing, like tattoos on fashion models.
Of course, these fashion caps can sell for $30, $40, even $50.
So as Midwesterners, real veterans of real cold, we should think about our next fashion export. Perhaps wool socks so long they pop out at the waist.
Or orange camouflage thongs like our deer hunters wear.
Oh, wait, that was the refrigerator repairman! Never mind.
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Send e-mail for Ross Werland to [email protected].