Men’s fashion is dreadfully boring, but one thing we used to have was a profusion and proliferation of different hats we could wear.
I know the m’lady meme and mall ninjas have forever cursed the fedora (as well as the actually, that’s a trilby crowd), but those memes postdate the decline of the hat by several decades.
Currently, we only have baseball caps and beanies in common circulation, with impractical-for-sidewalk-use cowboy hats being the only extant outlier.
Does anyone long for the return of the hat and/or have any insight into what caused their decline?
Fashion should be about your expression, not about what is popular. If you long for something, wear it. The only thing that really made the fedora/trilby toxic was that a bunch of people jumped on a hype train because they viewed it as a short cut to being fashionable. Making it inherently inauthentic. The speed at which they ditched those hats only proved the point that they were wearing it not for themselves, but for the opinion of others.
Authenticity will always be fashionable. Not everyone will like your style/fashion. What matters is that you love your style more than anyone, because then the opinion of others won’t matter.
People still make those old hats. Measure the size of your dome. Find one you love. Wear the shit out of it.