Amid the slick, cocktail-ish tailoring of an opening party at Carpenters Workshop Gallery last month, Alice Leguay stood out wearing a pink wool Rejina Pyo coat and white trainers with a navy baseball cap.
Leguay, a sustainability consultant, told me the cashmere cap was from Norwegian brand Varsity Headwear and that she shares it with her husband Loïc Le Gaillard, co-founder of the gallery. Alongside helping to disguise a bad hair day, its appeal was the baseball cap’s traditionally casual association, she said. “To me it says, ‘I’m not preened, dolled-up, and I’m comfortable with that’. It signals ‘casual with intention’.”
It’s up for debate whether all baseball cap wearers are quite so considered. However, the accessory is increasingly a year-round styling tool, featuring in many women’s wardrobes rather than saved to wear with sportswear or abandoned as the sun goes away.
High street retailers are backing the style. John Lewis revealed a 58 per cent increase in the sales of its £15 own-brand version from the first nine months of 2023 against 2022. Last month, Sienna Miller showed up in the TV campaign for Marks & Spencer’s new autumn womenswear range modelling a £12.50 grey cotton version with a roomy black tailored three-piece suit and trainers.
Also in September, felt baseball caps in black and beige appeared in the launch campaign for Uniqlo: C, the Japanese retailer’s collaboration with designer Clare Waight-Keller (£25, uniqlo.com), who has helmed both Chloé and Givenchy. “It’s an essential,” Waight-Keller said. “It finishes the look, just giving you that great attitude.”
“They’ve evolved from mere functional wear to becoming a versatile fashion statement, offering a broader range of styling possibilities,” says Asim Khandker, chief executive of Stiksen, a Stockholm-based brand that has been making caps since 2018 (and waterproof styles since 2020).
The brand, which makes almost all of its sales through caps, has seen an increase in female customers, who now make up 40 per cent of its online sales compared to 5 per cent in 2020.
If you were to draw a Venn diagram of recent fashion trends, the cap is the central point; the accessory where stealth wealth — itself heavily influenced by 1990s European minimalism — meets athleisure and street style. For shoppers wanting to buy into the “quiet luxury” trend in particular, baseball caps are one of the most accessible ways in.
“They’re becoming a key category in their own right,” says Jeannie Lee, head of womenswear at Selfridges. “Affordable and fun, they offer anonymity when desired, and an easy way to make a statement.”
Bally design director Simone Bellotti used baseball caps to good effect in his warmly received debut collection in Milan last month. His refined tailoring pieces were styled with branded caps that brought a sense of fashion immediacy to the catwalk. The 172-year-old brand has struggled for cut-through recently, but this season the models could have walked out into the street and looked completely of the moment.
The first known American Major League Baseball team to don baseball caps were the New York Knickerbockers, who began wearing peaked caps to keep the sun out of their eyes. The MLB doesn’t have the exact date of origin; initially, players wore straw hats or “chips” before teams began switching to plain caps made from merino wool. Logos and icons started appearing in the 1890s. They have never been compulsory, according to MLB regulations, but players are rarely seen without them.
Thanks to their adoption by hip-hop artists in the 1990s, caps from teams such as the LA Raiders and New York Yankees have become design classics. Cate Blanchett, as the impeccably dressed protagonist in the 2022 feature film Tár, wore a New York Rangers cap when travelling.
In the 2000s, a new generation of celebrities, including Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, went through a phase of wearing trucker caps by the brand of that moment, Von Dutch. In 2018, Gucci began a unisex collaboration with the official MLB, featuring varsity jackets and logo baseball caps, most notably the New York Yankees.
Most pertinent to the current trend, however, was Hedi Slimane’s collection for Celine spring/summer 2021, where almost every look was accessorised by a branded C cap. In the context of luxury Parisian fashion at that point, particularly a brand with the bourgeois tropes that Celine plays on, it still felt surprising; cheeky, but chic. It’s this moment that has now filtered through to the mass market.
They may not need to provide shade for the face in autumn, but styles in wool, cashmere and corduroy can stand up to a chill. Rebecca Thandi Norman, Copenhagen-based editor-in-chief of Scandinavia Standard, an English-language guide to Scandinavian style and culture, wears caps all year round, and when autumn hits, upgrades to thicker materials, including Stiksen’s recycled wool styles (£69, stiksen.com).
“The closeness of the cap to the skull, plus the fact that the visor acts as a shield from the wind, makes it great for more blustery days,” she says. “The only part missing is the ear protection.”
She’s seeing other women in Copenhagen favouring logo-less caps “with their hair twisted into a claw clip at the base of the neck” and likes styling them with a trenchcoat or a blazer and chunky jewellery, rather than sportswear. “I prefer them as a contrast accessory. Wearing them with my workout gear or athleisure feels too on-the-nose,” she says. Leave that to the Yankees.
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