Yes Cap
A paean to, and comprehensive roundup of, the best baseball caps in the game.
Hi! My addition to the “if they can’t remember xyz, they’re too young for you” canon is that accursed Urban Outfitters artifact, now around a decade old: the “Daddy” baseball cap. I saw the best minds of my generation fall prey to its pseudo-subversive allure, an army of Rachel Rabbit White wannabes with $35 pocket change who’d just graduated from wearing heart-eye sunglasses but hadn’t yet cracked the spine of their copies of Lolita. Oh god, is that particular hat responsible for the rebranding of a striaghtforward baseball cap to a “Dad hat”? The wound runs deep.
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Between the Daddy cap (one of which once hung, courtesy of a direly late-to-the party roommate who has since dropped off the face of the earth and left me to fend off Spectrum’s insistence that we never returned a piece of hardware they will chase me to the grave to secure, like an art piece on an exposed brick wall in a shafted Upper West Side apartment I occupied for a gloomy year) and the crimson MAGA hats that have been baked into our collective visual lexicon since 2016, it has not been a promising decade for baseball caps, aesthetically or legacy-wise. It’s so frusturating that now, when, say, a cap embroidered with Simone Weil’s scrawly signature comes to my attention, I have to think twice before pressing “Add to cart” solely due to its cranberry-red cotton twill.
I really like this design, and I love a pop of cardinal red—I honestly love a classic red baseball cap, full stop, and I feel deep rage that this icon has been so thoroughly appropriated by a squadron of empty-skulled weirdos. I did my part in trying to combat this association with a post definitively conflating the red cap with Paris, Texas, but who knows how long it’ll be before we can confidently crown ourselves in crimson. Wim Wenders should sue.
The baseball cap’s decade of bad PR is a crying shame, as I can’t think of a more pragmatic-but-still-potentially-sexy piece of headwear—much has been made in 2024 about Fancy Hats, with the fashion set casually trotting out their $2k pillboxes and Hunger Games-adjacent fascinators as if the rest of us are rubes for not already owning at least a couple custom-felted chapeaus, but I would take one (1) Robin Williams wearing a cap on a red carpet over their attempts at looking like the kind of person who’d salon with Proust any day (the gag that seems to evade many such hat-touters is that Proust would’ve rolled his eyes along with me—that’s kind of a main theme of In Search of Lost Time, and I have gone so many months without mentioning the fact that I read all seven books that I deserve this little moment, I think).
Baseball caps are at the top of the list of garments that get better looking with wear and tear–I tend to gravitate toward buying ones that come in “washed” colorways, but all the better if you’re able to chauffeur a brand-spanking-new cap into faded territory with nothing but hours of all-natural bleaching under the sun. They should almost never, save for in cases of hand embroidery, cost more than $50, and that’s a GENEROUSLY HIGH sum—I’m sure The Row has cooked up a farcically expensive iteration that it turns a 34000x profit on, but please don’t tell me about it, I like to live in a world unmired in the psychic dreck of people with too much money.
Other than a worn-in texture or the potential for graceful wear (i.e. thick, sturdy cotton fabric, typically darker/more saturated base colors, especially smart for avoiding those cartoonish orange sweatband stains), I typically gravitate away from black—it feels too flattened, I prefer subtle color to bring dimension to the cap. I still look for a hat that can go with literally anything (or at least not go with it in a way that feels comfortable), and usually wind up somewhere in the territory of navy blue. I pretty much exclusively go for hats with graphics, but they must be embroidered—another question of dimension. I used to be fundamentally against flat-brimmed caps, but so many cool designs could only be found in that style that I innoculated myself to them and now can appreciate their gamine, skaterly charm that offers and alternative the also charming nerdiness of a traditional, curved-brim cap.
Sidenote: The demise of the baseball cap reminds me of the downfall of the graphic tee, and both feel tied to a self conscious wariness around repping teams, bands, people, or even ideas that has led to a waning interest in merch, documented by GQ and mused upon by
earlier this summer. Emily finds herself “disheartened” by this rejection of merch, writing “i find that it reveals a lack of confidence and conviction in our interests when they are widely adopted by a monocultural force and/or called out by downtown new york meme accounts.” I agree with this, and think that it’s a powerful act to stand within a genuine fandom/desire to share an interest, no matter how mainstream, but I also like the fact that the visceral “ick” feeling some have reported at realizing their look has become Starter Pack bait might be an internal compass pointing toward a lack of genuine interest in the mainstream thing they’re repping (and/or a sneaking suspicion the thing isn’t something they feel aligns with their values or the person they want to become). Let me put it this way: I don’t think you could pry a committed Swiftie’s Taylor t-shirt out of their cold, dead hands, and that’s great for them, but to any kids out there who feel the need to crumple their Eras Tour merch in a corner of their bureau: try listening, really listening, to some Sinead O’Connor or Fiona Apple. Just an experiment.Anyway, below are an innumerable amount of baseball caps I’ve painstakingly sourced across the web for paid subscribers (with my thoughts and tips, plus an ingenious sourcing insight c/o my brilliant colleague
). Hats off to you!