You can buy a hat with a forest green brim and an off-white upper at the Masters golf tournament and at 7-Eleven. The athleisure brand Vuori sells one for $48. So did Andy Roddick’s tennis podcast, “Served.” They were $40 but are now sold out.
In the past couple of years, the two-tone baseball cap has become the red Toyota Camry of the hat market. I saw one. Then I couldn’t stop seeing them.
I saw them from golf brands (Fore All), basketball lifestyle labels (Monday Hoops Club) and a surf company in landlocked Austin, Texas (Mañana). Team U.S.A. sells one, as did Ray’s Bar in Miami. The Barstool Sports website sells a $38 version that reads “Boy Mom.” Zendaya was photographed in one from Bero, Tom Holland’s nonalcoholic beer brand.
“This year that particular combination is up about 10 percent from, like, zero,” said Mitch Cahn, the owner of Unionwear, a hat manufacturer in New Jersey, speaking broadly about two-tone hats. Sure, you can find caps with red brims, black brims, yellow brims. But the green variant is, based on my unscientific count, the most common.
“It’s a color, but it’s also very neutral, so it goes with a lot of the wardrobe,” said Daniel Abbink, the founder of Fifth & Set, a Copenhagen clothing label. His $48 green and cream cap is sold out. “It’s a less extreme step to add some color to the wardrobe,” he said.
If color combos matter, so does shape. The caps are structured at the crown, like a trucker hat that was told to cover up. They brandish a logo for whatever golf company or private equity-backed kombucha start-up the wearer is supporting. Sometimes they just say a place — “Maine,” for instance. Often the logo is stitched upside down, as if the designer had a few too many Michelob Ultras before opening Photoshop.
It is not a fashion item; it is something more like merch. It is spiritually Austin, not Avenue Montaigne. Its natural habitat is the pickleball court.
“Everyone on Mulberry Street was wearing this four years ago, and now every single person playing golf in secondary and tertiary cities wears it,” said Alex Hartman, the creator of Nolita Dirtbag, an Instagram account pillorying trends that people think make them unique but really make them part of a crowd.
“It’s not too much of a fashion risk for a guy in Charleston to whip out,” Mr. Hartman said. A mass of people, after all, just want to keep up, not stick out.
But the ubiquity of the green and cream cap is an instructive example of how a clothing trend can bubble up from some niche place, only to spread outward and become a beacon of middlebrow tastes.
The first one I remember actually noticing came from Aimé Leon Dore, a New York brand packaging a plastic-y, street-prep style. The brand trades on ’90s nostalgia: racing green Range Rovers, Michael Jordan dunks and color-blocked nautical parkas.
The green and cream hat, which Aimé Leon Dore introduced in 2022, was part of that “look back to go forward” air. It did not seem like a coincidence that the cream color (or “natural,” as some hat manufacturers call it) appeared aged.
“The last time that style was popular was 30 years ago,” Mr. Cahn of Unionwear said of two-toned hats. Green-brimmed ball caps that his company made to commemorate Brazil’s World Cup win in 1994 can still be found on eBay for as much as $100.
“A lot of people kind of want to rewind time, because we’re so over consuming things,” said Jonathan Ruley, a founder of Huega House, a San Diego apparel brand that began selling two-tone hats four years ago.
What Mr. Ruley is saying, of course, is not that people really want to consume less. If that were so, he’d be out of business. It’s that they want to consume things that remind them of a time when things didn’t seem to move so fast.
“There’s this feeling of you just want to go analog again,” Mr. Abbink said. From this perspective, the hat sits on the branch with digital cameras, Adidas Sambas sneakers and even Guinness beer — pre-social media artifacts that have since been amplified into fads.
People also just want to keep up with whatever their favorite quarterback (like Josh Allen of the Bills in a Huega House green-brimmed hat) or Jenner (take Kendall in one from Siegelman Stable) is into.
If the green and cream cap once had the gloss of something exclusive, its prevalence on Instagram ferried it to the mainstream. People began to think of this as “the cool hat” simply because they’d seen it so often. The original “why” for the trend fell away.
“It’s like the TikTok shop hat,” Mr. Hartman said.
When we spoke, he had just seen a man in a green and cream hat shopping at a Walmart in upstate New York. “Anyone starting a brand in Austin, Charleston or even New York,” he said, “that will be the first piece of clothing they make.”
Jacob Gallagher is a Times reporter covering fashion and style.
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