AA-2026-DDF12E
On the image
Somewhere in a European city in the 1950s, a street fair has taken over a tree-lined boulevard, and a young man has paused at a hat vendor's wooden crate to try on a boater. He wears it with the slightly self-conscious tilt of someone who has just decided he is the kind of person who wears boaters, which is the same decision men had been making at summer fairs for about seventy years by that point. A red motorcycle parked at his hip completes the picture of a man who believed he had assembled a look.
The vendor's stock — stacked straw hats by the dozen, including one elaborate feathered piece that suggests a customer with ambitions — represents a commerce that had operated on the edges of public celebrations since long before anyone in this crowd was born. Behind him the fair sprawls along the avenue: balloon clusters, novelty stands, the particular density of a crowd that has nowhere urgent to be. This is a postwar European leisure economy still relearning how to exist.
The boater was already an antique affectation by the 1950s, the kind of hat young men wore to signal a breezy irony about the past while still, unmistakably, buying the hat. He is looking at something off to the right with the expression of a man who has made his purchase and is now simply enjoying his own decision.
Visually related — by likeness
Straw Hat Vendor and Street Fair, Continental Europe, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-DDF12E. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/straw-hat-vendor-and-street-fair-continental-europe-1950s.
@misc{aaAA2026DDF12E,
title = {Straw Hat Vendor and Street Fair, Continental Europe, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-DDF12E},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/straw-hat-vendor-and-street-fair-continental-europe-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Straw Hat Vendor and Street Fair, Continental Europe, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-DDF12E UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/straw-hat-vendor-and-street-fair-continental-europe-1950s ER -
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