Straw Hat Vendors, Outdoor Market, Continental Europe, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Straw Hat Vendors, Outdoor Market, Continental Europe, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Straw Hat Vendors, Outdoor Market, Continental Europe, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-BE9FF5

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Every man at this outdoor market stall has already bought the hat he is selling, which is either good advertising or a conflict of interest, depending on your view of commerce. The straw boater had been declaring its wearer a man of leisured sophistication since before either of these vendors was born, and in the 1950s it was still doing that work, even at a pavement stall surrounded by hats tumbled loose on the ground like a collapsed argument.

The man in the blue sweater stands with the particular stillness of someone who has decided that posing for the camera is beneath him but will tolerate it. Behind him his colleague is already pitching to a customer, holding up a boater with the practiced gesture of a man who understands that the difference between a sale and a non-sale is getting the hat onto the buyer's head before doubt can form. The whole scene has the easy outdoor-market confidence of postwar European summer tourism, when a town could sustain three stalls selling essentially the same hat to the same passing crowd.

The straw boater would be nearly dead as a civilian fashion item within a decade, outlasted by the flat cap and eventually the baseball hat, neither of which required a vendor to wear the product to make the pitch work.

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