Bucket Hats

The bucket hat started life in the Irish countryside around 1900, made of wool felt or tweed and worn by farmers and fishermen who needed something that would turn rain — the lanolin in unwashed wool made it naturally water-repellent. Function first, fashion a distant second. It traveled through the interwar period as the "Irish walking hat," adopted internationally by people who valued a hat that could fold flat into a coat pocket and be reshaped the next day. High fashion first noticed in the 1960s, when milliners like Lilly Daché built stiffer, sharper versions for the mod look, giving the shape its first runway moment.

The soft cotton version that owned the 1990s has a different ancestor: the olive-drab tropical hat issued to US soldiers during the Vietnam War, which came home to a second life as a fishing and sun hat before drifting into street style. In the 1980s rappers adopted it — a trend set off by LL Cool J and Run-DMC — and it stayed part of street fashion through the 1990s, a hat equally at home in a rap video and a tackle box, which is exactly why it ended up on so many heads in between.

It faded in the 2000s, then re-emerged in the 2010s as a catwalk item after celebrities like Rihanna wore it, and luxury houses including Gucci, Loewe and Prada now sell their own versions. A century in, the bucket hat has traced a full circle from farmland to runway — and somewhere in the middle, the 1990s made it invisible by making it universal.