The only time you need to know the answer to this question is when you’re standing at a register staring down two hats in your hands, one from the men’s rack and one from a display over labeled “ladies fit” that some bitch behind you insists are different despite my protests and without asking me if I need help. You have thirty seconds left before you buy one or both or neither and shuffle out, head slumped, looking either like a man who can’t understand why clothes don’t fit or like a clown embarrassed by both parties involved and not just the gender binary your skull refuses to adhere to. That’s when you care about this. Not when you’re comfortably at home on your computer scrutinizing some silly size chart when in reality hats are as simple as hoping you guessed correctly. No, you need to know the answer standing over that register when you’re sweating and being told impatiently by an employee who JUST WANTS TO GO HOME for the day that yes you can exchange this anytime but why don’t you just decide already.
Women’s hats do indeed generally run smaller. But also smaller doesn’t mean what you think it means and the reality of the situation split into two trains of thought for me that day that have never since reunited into a clear answer.
There’s the thought about actual circumference, which everyone knows and is pretty much assumes is the entire explanation. But the other – and this is the part that no one mentions until you’ve already wasted a $20 hat – is about how the hat itself is constructed. Crown height. Panel structure. How it actually sits upon your head as opposed to just lying in your hand while you stare into the abyss at a fucking register.
The Hat Size Difference Is Valid, But Only Skin Deep
The circumference on most women’s hats is going to be a half inch to an inch smaller than the corresponding men’s or unisex style of the same hat. If you have a particularly small head that’s probably going to be the end of the road for you since even the men’s small is likely to fit loose, but if your head is an average size or smaller that’s the difference between a cap that fits and one that keeps falling down your forehead like your parents embarrassing you at a baseball game. I actually measured my head that day because standing there I decided I wanted to know for sure. Wrapped a tape measure around my head like some kind of clothing snob and found myself right on the fence; at around 22 and a half inches I was in that weird no man’s land where the adjustable versions of most “men’s” caps and half of “women’s” fitted caps overlapped and would both theoretically fit me. The range where those two areas overlap is much larger than companies want you to believe because I think that’s the first thing we can agree on. It’s not 22 inches and you start at men’s, 21.5 inches and you start at ladies’. The line isn’t solid, it bleeds into each other and there are tons of people out there who fall into that overlap never knowing which section they’re supposed to pick from.
Ultimately what sold me on the women’s cap wasn’t the tag number though, it was how the sweatband fit when I looked closely. On the men’s version I grabbed the circumference was loose enough that there was an actual gap between my skin and the inside of the hat. Hell, I could feel air going by when I wore it! Doesn’t matter how tight everything else is if that hat’s sliding around on your head and a gust of wind can catch it and lift it right off chances are good it’ll happen to you too. Ask me how I know this happened to me once. Twice if you include the jaw dropping look of disdain my brother gave me after it sailed into Lake Michigan.
The ladies fit, by contrast, felt tight the second I pulled it on. No gaps, no tests for lift, just a snug feeling that I’d come to understand as the root of “smaller” fitting better. ‘Cause small isn’t always the number, it’s sometimes built tighter around whatever that number is. So if you find yourself stressing about this take both styles into your hands, not for the numbers they advertise but how they feel when you slip them on. Is one hat loose against your head with a noticeable gap you could slide two fingers into or are both of them tight? That gap is your enemy because it will only get worse.
The Shape Is the Thing No One Ever Talks About, And Why Women’s Hats Are Better
I want to have words with whoever told me circumference was all I needed to pay attention to that day because sizing isn’t. Women’s hats, at least in my experience trying on countless hats and returning just as many because I can’t seem to hold onto a cap to save my life, tend to have a shorter distance between the bottom of the sweatband and the top button. Crown height used to refer, which dictates how that particular hat sits once you take it out of your hands and actually wear it. A men’s hat with the perfect circumference but a taller crown will sit atop your head instead of nestled into it, which is exactly what happened when I finally settled on a men’s cap of my own and ruined what should have been a great afternoon.
I put that new cap on, stared intently at my reflection because I had worked up enough anxiety about the entire situation to actually care how things looked by this point, and it looked wrong.
Taller than it should have been. Although I didn’t know how hats were supposed to sit at the time, I knew my head wasn’t pintucked like that one was trying to do, and that confidence eventually lead me back to my old stand-by, the ballcap I’ve had since somewhere around 2004. A raggedy old canvas model that’s been through hell and back but still fits my head like it was custom-made, and holy shit is the crown height taller on that thing than anything I tried on that day. Thanks to years of knowingly wearing one size too large it sits almost cradled in my head now, pushed back as well as down. It’s not that the ladies version was wrong or that mine is right, they’re just built on opposite assumptions about the shape of your head.
That’s why I say the women’s hats fit better. Because hat circumference is only half the battle of finding something that looks right on you. The other half is a shape you can’t measure with two inches of string and will never find clearly explained on any size chart. Hat is a disgusting word too, let’s never say it again.
Reg spent thirty years buying for a menswear shop floor in Sheffield before it closed. He writes about clothes built to last, compares every new buy with something he’s owned for twenty years, and has made most of the expensive mistakes already.
