Textile texts: Under your protection and umbrella

Everyone longs for the summer sun, but as soon as it shows its bright face, you see a lot of pinched faces – that’s a little too much light for our eyes. Of course you can reduce the brightness using sunglasses. However, it has some disadvantages: it gets dirty, breaks and is lost. On top of that, it functions as a questionable mask: its wearers evade the facial communication that is so important to us humans. Interlocutors look perplexed and doubtful into two dark or mirrored surfaces that are seen as an expression of coolness, but often enough only hide a fragile ego or dark circles under the eyes. Communication at eye level is not possible with people wearing sunglasses, which is why this undemocratic accessory should be rejected.

Instead, praise be given to the democratic, proletarian baseball cap. This shields the eyes from the sun without making facial communication more difficult. Pulled low over the face, it can provide a certain degree of anonymity from a distance, but we can also talk face to face with people close to us while wearing a baseball cap. Erich Mühsam already knew the significance of the positioning of the cap, even though he was not yet wearing a baseball cap (“And the revolutionary cap / he pushed onto his left ear /
Felt extremely dangerous.” Similar to playing with the fan in absolutist courts, the orientation and angle of inclination of the umbrella conveys a variety of messages: from the horizontal upwards, open-mindedness, carefreeness, even arrogance can be expressed, while a downwardly inclined umbrella clearly demands “Leave me alone!”

The practical use of the baseball cap is also enormous, because it not only protects our eyes from the sun’s rays, but also our heads. Bald people in particular appreciate this, but even the narrowest part of the head needs protection. What is useful for long-haired people is that the baseball cap keeps the hair out of the face.

But the sun doesn’t always shine in summer, and this shows another advantage of this piece of clothing: unlike sunglasses, it also protects against rain. On the other hand, if you leave the house with dark lenses when the sun is shining, you will be left looking like a watered poodle or long-haired dachshund when a thunderstorm suddenly occurs.

A playful accessory and a useful piece of clothing at the same time, the baseball cap is an important part of the summer outfit. But of course it is important to make the right choice when it comes to cut and design. The so-called trucker hats with their front part made of foam and the plastic net on the back as well as the flex caps with their large, flat peaks that are closed at the back should be avoided. Both are anchored in different youth cultures of the noughties, and that’s where they should stay.

The baseball cap for today is either a so-called “dad cap” or a “five panel cap”: the former has a, as the name suggests, a classic cut and is worn with a curved peak. It usually has a small embroidery on the front, often brand logos. Even the Suhrkamp publishing house sells such hats. This would not have existed when the publisher was still based in Frankfurt. But in Berlin-Mitte they obviously want to keep up with the local clientele. The dad cap is worn by classic Ralph Lauren snobs as well as Antifa hipsters and Talahons. (The latter are a group of young men between the ages of 15 and 20, summarized under a new youth word, mostly with a migrant background. Talahons prefer to dress in brand logos – whether real or fake – and wear gold chains, fanny packs and caps.)

The five panel cap, on the other hand, has a flat cut with a flat but not too large peak and is more likely to be worn by fashion-conscious, sporty people in the surfboard-gravel bike-hiking continuum. But just like the hat itself, these categorizations and boundaries should not be taken too narrowly. Every Dippsche is Deggelsche, and every Kopp is Käppsche.