10 Reasons Why Men Over 60 Are Throwing Out Their Baseball Caps for This One Hat

There is a hat on a hook by your door right now. You've had it a long time. It's soft in the wrong places, the brim has gone the shape of a taco, and the colour is best described as former.

You keep wearing it because it's there, because it's easy, and because nobody has ever said anything.

Here's the uncomfortable part: they've noticed. They just haven't said anything.

Over the past two years more than 35,000 men have quietly retired that cap and replaced it with the same thing — a hand-cut flat cap from a small English maker called Harrington & Co. Hatters. It has 4.8 stars from over 6,000 reviews and it sells out roughly every six weeks.

We looked into why. Here are the ten reasons that come up over and over again.

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This is the maker's actual founding principle, and it's the reason most men mention first.

Inside there's a soft band with two antique-brass buckles on the sides. You set it once, on day one, and it holds. No sizing chart, no measuring tape, no ordering a Large and praying. It covers 52 cm to 62 cm — 20.5 to 24.4 inches — which is virtually every adult man, including the ones who have spent their lives being told they have "a big head."

Ball caps do the opposite. A plastic snapback gives you nine fixed positions and none of them are your head.

Ask any man over 60 why he stopped wearing hats and you'll hear the same answer: they hurt after a few hours.

That's not your head. That's the construction. Foam fronts, stiff plastic closures and cheap seams put all the pressure on one narrow strip of your forehead. By lunchtime you have a headache and a stripe.

There is no plastic and no foam anywhere in this cap. Men routinely report wearing it eight or nine hours and forgetting it's on — which is, when you think about it, the entire job description of a good hat.

Most "everyday" caps are polyester, which is a fancy way of saying plastic. Plastic traps heat. So men take the hat off exactly when they need it most — in the sun.

This one is cut from breathable washed organic cotton. It's worn on golf courses in Arizona in August and on morning walks in Michigan in November. One cap, twelve months, no seasonal swap.

Every man has a story about a hat and a gust of wind, and every one of those stories involves a tall, loose cap acting like a sail.

A flat cap sits low and close to the skull, so wind passes over it rather than getting underneath the crown. Boats, piers, golf carts, soccer fields, convertible car windows down — this is the single most common thing customers write in about after they've owned it a month.

This is the reason that surprised us most when we read through the reviews.

Men over 60 are not trying to look 40. They say so, repeatedly and emphatically. What they want is to look like themselves, done well.

The problem is the available options. A baseball cap reads "grandpa mowing the lawn." A fedora or trilby reads "trying too hard" — several men used the phrase "like I'm in a play." The flat cap lands precisely in the gap: classic, masculine, adult, and old enough as a shape that it never looks like a trend.

Nobody over 60 wants a hat wardrobe. They want one hat that works with a flannel on Saturday, a polo on the course and a jacket at dinner — with no decision required before coffee.

Because the colours are muted and the shape is classic, it does exactly that. It comes in six: Denim Blue, Coal Black, Tobacco Brown, Beige, Field Olive and Rosewood Red. Denim Blue and Coal Black account for the majority of orders, and a surprising number of men come back for a second colour within the first month.

Denim Blue

Coal Black

Tobacco Brown

Beige

Field Olive

Rosewood Red

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Harrington & Co. is a small operation. Two brothers, taught the trade by their father. Every cap is measured, marked and cut by hand in small batches, with real brass hardware and a proper lining. It is not the fast way to make a hat.

What's unusual is how the current version came about. Before the redesign, the company emailed every customer over 60 it had — happy and unhappy — and asked one open question: what actually matters to you in an everyday hat?

More than 3,000 men wrote back. Their five most common answers — comfort, breathability, looking age-appropriate, matching everything, and staying put in wind — became the five rules the cap is now built to. The polyester lining, the plastic closure and the tall crown were all removed as a direct result.

Antique brass buckles rather than painted plastic. Stitching that holds its line after a year. A washed denim that fades handsomely instead of going grey and sad. It can be shaken out and put straight back on after eleven hours folded on a car seat.

This is the difference between a hat you replace every eighteen months and one you're still wearing in a decade — which, incidentally, is the honest way to think about the price.

This is the most-repeated theme in the review section, and it has almost nothing to do with hats.

Men in their sixties and seventies are not used to being complimented on their appearance. It happens rarely, and then it stops happening altogether. Then they wear this cap to the hardware store and a stranger says something, and they go home and tell their wife about it.

By an enormous margin, the single most common sentence in the company's inbox is a version of: "my wife says it's the best thing I've put on in years."

The guarantee exists because of answer #1 in that survey. If the fit isn't right, it isn't right — and the company's position on that is unusually plain:

At $30, half its usual $60, with free shipping and three months to change your mind, the practical risk of trying it is close to zero.

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The four questions everybody asks

What men are saying