I am not exactly up to date with fashion. When I’m not completely oblivious to it, I’m most often a year or two behind. I’ll think, “I saw a lot of people wearing that thing,” and then I will wear that thing, and then nobody else will be wearing that thing, and I will feel a little like I did when I was in my growth spurts as a kid and I was not only six inches taller than everyone else in Sunday School but I was five inches too tall for my church pants. Sometimes, this will go on long enough that the thing I am wearing will come back into style, because once I’ve gone to the trouble of buying a clothe, I don’t want to go to that trouble again.
This is kind of how I came to wear the bucket hat.
It was September of 2017, and a friend of mine who was a lot cooler than I was invited me to her birthday party, which was a party bus. I didn’t know what cool people wore, but I decided to lean into that and look a little ridiculous, putting on the bucket hat and a t-shirt a friend had made which featured a cartoon of gray whales mating and bubble text reading “Don’t be the third whale.” (Important context on this: There are twice as many male gray whales as there are female gray whales. We’ll have to talk through how that works out another time.) I’d bought the bucket hat so I could look like Carl Spackler one time in college. I’d kept it around because I saw a bunch of guys wearing them at a tailgate in 2014.
Thankfully, the t-shirt with whales humping on it made it clear I wasn’t trying to look good or anything, so most people just gave me a strange look in the bucket hat and moved on. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t have remembered that I’d even worn the bucket hat had the following picture not been taken:
Yep. That’s me. Leaning out the window of a converted school bus on a four-lane highway somewhere east of Minneapolis, waving at passing traffic, oblivious to the fact we’re coming up on a Dairy Queen.
Four months after that picture was taken, I created a Twitter account, and I needed a picture, and I realized that the bucket hat picture was the one in the camera roll that best captured the energy I wanted to bring towards blogging about the NIT. From there? The mindset stuck. When people ask why an NIT blogger must wear a bucket hat, I usually say, “In case it rains.” Really, though, I just want to be in the right headspace for the job.
This is a long way to ask the following question: Are bucket hats back in style again? For tailgates and such? Or, were they briefly in style and have they gone out of style again? Because I was seeing a lot of bucket hats for a while there.
