Old Hat?

A closer look at my favorite 'distressed' ballcap — and what it, and other items like it, silently say about the America they're trying to summon.

That “well-worn” Stroh’s ballcap that has been in my family for months. (Photo ©2023, Ted Anthony)

Throughout my childhood, Stroh’s Bohemian Beer (“America’s only fire-brewed beer”) was a staple at our dinner table in suburban Pittsburgh. My parents came of age in Detroit, where Stroh’s was brewed, and kept it around as a pleasant piece of home. Occasionally my father would permit me furtive sips from his longneck bottle, pulled from a case of them that seemed to always be chilling in our garage.

My dad had this ratty Stroh’s baseball cap he’d always wear. I don’t know where he got it. He was an avid gardener, and he’d wear it outside while doing yard work, so the bill of the cap frayed and started coming apart, and the white mesh got all brittle and yellowed. I vividly remember the time that a nail from a nail gun punctured the top of the cap, just above the logo. I am proud to still have that cap today, and I wear it around the house as a comfortable, comforting reminder of all the interesting things my father did in it over many long years.

Except … except none of that stuff in the previous paragraph actually happened.

The first paragraph is 100% true. The second is pure fiction (except for the fact that my father liked to garden). But it’s fiction with a purpose as carefully crafted as the product it describes. There are people out there who want to help us believe that our ballcaps — and other items in our lives — have been through all kinds of experiences that never actually took place.

I bought the Stroh’s cap for $30 last year from a company called Angry Minnow Vintage, which specializes in distressed baseball caps featuring old and nostalgic brands — Hamm’s, Hostess, White Castle, Waffle House, Schaefer, Texaco — to be worn as if they’re comfortable old friends that have accompanied you through sweat and tears and hard workdays and have achieved a unique patina that only the passage of time can confer.

And yet.

I also bought the Waffle House cap from Angry Minnow. (I mean, c’mon! A Waffle House cap! How could I not?) When it arrived, I compared the bills. Take a look. The right part of the brims are fraying … in the exact same place. Same story with the middle of the bill. For good measure, a few frayings on the top of the bill match close to exactly. And — this is the best part — each hat has a ragged “hole” at the top of the front, in the exact same place.

Photos ©2023, Ted Anthony.

So let’s lay this out. It seems clear that there exists a machine — or at least a pattern — that makes these caps pretty identically “distressed.” A machine that helps us stamp the marks of artificial experiences that we haven’t had onto our ballcaps. I want you to pause for a moment and allow yourself to be flabbergasted by this. I know it’s totally normal today — we’ll get into that in a bit — but just consider that there is an entire industry that has cropped up around helping us look like we’ve had experiences that we never had.

My father loved Stroh’s. He MIGHT have had a ballcap with the logo on it. He MIGHT have worn it out doing stuff around the house across the years. He MIGHT have given it to me, and I MIGHT have treasured it for years to come. But he did none of those things. Yet I have this cap nonetheless, already broken in with implied, synthetic experiences that didn’t actually take place.

I want to talk a bit today about how much of this surrounds us — and what it might mean.

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SIGNALS OF DISTRESS

Distressed jeans at Ross Park Mall, Pittsburgh. Photo ©2019, Ted Anthony.

Ours is an experience economy. We learned long ago to sell (and buy) the sizzle, not the steak. Rarely these days do we see ads or commercials that focus on the product as we did in the 1950s and 1960s, when so much advertising was keyed to what a product did and how well it did it.

In the most renowned episode of “Mad Men,” ad exec Don Draper (Jon Hamm) wins over his client, Eastman Kodak, by effectively rebranding, in real time, their “photo wheel” that displays slides in a projector. How do you sell something so mechanical and straightforward as a tray of slides? Don understands, intuitively, how to do it. It’s not about new technology, he says. It’s about nostalgia — and adding a patina to something new to make it feel like it’s always been there and always must be:

“This device isn’t a spaceship. It’s a time machine. It goes backwards and forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel. It’s called the Carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels — around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.”

Don Draper saw nostalgia as “a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.” That’s relevant here. Far more powerful than memory alone. That Stroh’s hat was never worn by my dad. But I wish it had been. I wish I could carry around — put on my head, even — a hat that had seen so many days in his life, looking out upon the world from just above his eyes. A hat infused with the dirt and sweat and experiences of a man now gone almost eight years. A hat that bore the label of the hometown beer he and my mom drank during all the times we sat at the kitchen table and ate and played word games. A time when I was a little boy, sitting in my chair … in a place where I knew I was loved.

It didn’t happen that way, but if I wish just enough, and I send in $30, I can buy my way into feeling that it happened that way. The sizzle isn’t just used to sell the steak; it has overwritten the ribeye entirely.

“Distressed” products allow us to touch things that were never there, and — particularly potently — permit us to access a sensibility, usually an implied American sensibility, that either has disappeared or never existed at all.

The most prominent example of this breed is the rise of “distressed blue jeans.” You see them everywhere these days. Some are barely frayed. Some have holes everywhere and the thighs are “worn” to white, as if by a longtime wearer.

These pants, many say, trace their lineage to the grunge era of the 1990s, which in turn owes part of its own fashion lineage (this is my surmise) to the haphazardly ripped middle-school and high-school jeans of the 1980s that were themselves a working-class backlash to designer jeans. (These were the kinds of jeans my mother tried to avoid by buying me knee-reinforced Toughskins from Sears Roebuck, much to my adolescent horror.)

But now, I can walk into an American Eagle in the mall and see piles of distressed jeans, stacked just so, and realize that — just like the caps — the distressing effect, which is supposed to shout “nonconformist” and “I’m my own person,” matches up perfectly across the entire pile. (This is, needless to say, an ironically orderly collection of something that has been named “distressed.”)

They also tap into another great American tradition: the shortcut. Why pause to have the experience when you can purchase the experience and make it yours? As Kasey Weeks, a Minnesota man who wears “lightly shredded jeans,” told The Wall Street Journal last year in a story about the return of distressed denim, “I don’t have the patience to wait and wear a pair of jeans like 2,000 times [to] get them worn in.”

I read that yesterday and it reminded me of a female friend I had in Philadelphia in the 1990s who distressed her own jeans before, I think, the term was even coined. Once I asked her: Why do you like those? Her answer has stuck with me through the years: “Because I want to look like I’ve been through a lot of things in them.”

Thirty years later, that’s still one of the most American things I’ve ever heard anyone say.

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RAVENOUS FOR ‘RELICING’

A reliced guitar. This one is $5,350. Photo ©2023, Ted Anthony.

We’ll wrap things up today by visiting a music shop along the Allegheny River east of Pittsburgh. I was there with my son a couple weeks ago and learned a new term: “reliced guitars.” Aside from the problematic orthography (though I suppose one might confuse “relicked” with “licked a second time”), this was a whole new world to me, though not entirely unexpected.

A reliced guitar is a brand-new guitar meticulously crafted to look like it isn’t one. And these are not cheap; the reliced guitars I saw there would break most any bank. There’s the Fender Custom Shop 1959 Heavy Relic Stratocaster at $4,550, the Custom Shop Limited Edition ‘60s Relic Telecaster Thinline at $5,350, and the Custom Shop Limited Edition ‘51 Relic Nocaster at $5,650. “Please ask before handling,” they all say, unsurprisingly.

Apparently, I learn, there are myriad levels of relicing in the guitar world, from a barely touched model to one that looks like it was abused on tour by a thrasher with substance-abuse issues. There was a fascinating article about all this in 2020 in Guitar World, “How guitar relic’ing took over the world” (note the apostrophe). It included this extraordinary passage.

“The Journeyman Relic finish looks as if the guitar has been used but not abused, Lewis explains. `Handed down or changed hands through the years but mostly played around the house, the Journeyman has seen the occasional jam session or weekend gig. Well taken care of over the years but has finish checking, some ‘friendly’ down-to-the-wood nicks and dings, Relic hardware and moderate playing wear. A very lucky find!’”

Call it a pinnacle of American consumer society: The lie as master craftsmanship.

Americans value honesty — as a branding tool, from George Washington’s “I cannot tell a lie” to “Honest Abe” Lincoln all the way down the greased slide to the sundry permutations of “Honest Earl’s Used Cars” that used to dot the republic. Even today, over and over, we deploy the notion of honesty as a way to sell stuff — in all kinds of dishonest ways, both malignant and benign. This is particularly true with items that try to summon the appeal of the past.

We buy beef jerky in plastic packets that say “Jerky from the Jar” and have a picture of a jar on them — because pulling jerky out of a Mason jar at a checkout counter, strip by individual strip, speaks to the (very vanilla) America that some people still long for (for more of this feeling, visit the explosion of Americana for sale that sits in the front of any Cracker Barrel Old Country Store restaurant). We embrace terms like “hand-dipped ice cream” and “hand-cut fries” as if something in the human involvement they describe adds to the value of the product and what we get out of it. As if we’re somewhere in the Midwest at a county fair in 1956, walking the midway and getting served this stuff by local small businesspeople in pristine paper hats.

But a few moments of thought can puncture this artificial homespunnery. What if our ice-cream was in fact machine-dipped? Would anything be lost? What if a gadget cut up potatoes that were just as fresh as the efforts of a low-paid fast-food worker? Are fries sans mechanization a better product? Probably not, but machine-cut potatoes might not feel quite as appealing and delightfully retrograde, and they might not catch the eye of someone who is looking for something that seems down-home and analog and puts forward that small-town flavor. Experience is a commodity, but now, more than ever, the appearance of experience is the real commodity.

So it is that in 2023, I can happily wear a distressed ballcap, my 19-year-old son can lust after a $5,000 reliced guitar and my entire family can go out for hand-dipped ice cream and think we’re getting something more satisfying — something that connects with tradition.

When I lived in China at the beginning of the century, one of the most popular things going for foreigners to buy and take home was stuff fashioned under the banner of laomu xinzuo (老木新作), or “old wood, new work.” The concept was this: Woodworkers would reclaim older slabs of wood from decades-old doors and tables and cabinets — things that might have been discarded otherwise — and fashion them into, well, fresh doors and tables and cabinets. We have some of these in our house now — a desk, a dining-room table, a liquor cabinet and a TV stand. Each has a genuine patina of age. Each has a unique history (sadly, it’s a history I don’t know beyond the provinces from which they came). And best of all, they are not posing as something they aren’t.

And these other things that dot our marketplaces and our mindsets? To me, they just raise more questions than they answer. In the end, they disappoint. The stories they imply are not real. And even as I somewhat hypocritically consume them myself (though I have NEVER bought ripped jeans), I can’t escape the notion that such items are, in a way, a cheat — even though in many cases we’re the ones who are happily cheating ourselves. They’re the product equivalent of Cliff’s Notes — the quintessential American shortcut.

Because now, to have our jeans or our baseball cap look lived-in, we don’t actually have to do the living. We can purchase our guitars with markings that carry the implication of fictional gigs past. We can have our jerky from the “jar” — the jar that might have sat by the fictional analog cash register inside that fictional gas station with the fictional avuncular guy behind the counter wearing the fictional Texaco cap made by Angry Minnow Vintage. In short, to go back to Don Draper one more time: We can buy, and own, things far more powerful than memory alone.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to put on my father’s old ballcap and go have an ice-cold Stroh’s.