By Mark Rhoads
Forty-eight years ago President Jack Kennedy nearly single-handedly destroyed the male haberdashery business in America. He refused to wear hats even on very cold days. One of the very few times he was photographed wearing a hat was coming out of the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago during the Cuban Missle Crisis of October 1962. The idea was to make the press think he had a head cold so he would not have to fully explain his fast return to Washington, DC. Yesterday, the late president's brother, Sen. Ted Kennedy, before his collapse at lunch, showed up for the Obama oath ceremony wearing a very broad brimmed black fedora of the style that some Mafia dons used to wear back in the 1930s. Vice President Dick Cheney was wearing the same hat and so were dozens of others, all black and all sinister-looking. Was this an accidental fashion statement or a sign that 1930s clothing of the New Deal is coming back in American politics?
