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Comment by Solvency | Hacker News Reader

Apparently it's about going all the way. Wear just a fedora? You're a neckbeard. Go fully 1940s in every way? Darling.

That is very interesting to me. I never understood why people hate so much that neckbeards mix a fedora with t-shirt and jeans. Does anybody get mad at Jensen (from Nvidia) for wearing a biker leather jacket without being a biker?

I think some of it is just the poor aesthetic combination of fedora with a t-shirt and jeans. The fedora feels like an attempt to be stylish without going the full effort to coordinate the look. It’s a lack of self-awareness that probably comes across as the wearer saying “I am now stylish because of this hat” where that clearly isn’t true to an observer.

It's not about the fedora, it's about the stereotype that caused that association to mean something.

It's middle school cliquism. Assuming that stereotypes about clothing tell you everything you need to know about a person.

No, it's plain old pattern matching.

People wore fedoras to identify them as part of a subculture (Reddit gentlemen).

Most people who weren't part of the subculture pretty quickly figured out that removing their fedora meant people didn't assume they were a part of it, so they took it off.

Same thing with hipster glasses, mullets, dreads, swastikas, list goes on...

> Reddit gentlemen

Is that where that came from? It sounds right.

I used to wear nice hats regularly including a couple of fedoras, but I had to retire them because of this.

Except for the swastikas, everything you mentioned is just more lazy stereotyping.

How many times have you met an actual douchebag wearing a fedora? How many times have you heard people saying that all douchebags wear fedoras? I bet the ratio is at least 1:50. It's like how people who insist all vegans are smug outnumber actual smug vegans by a huge margin.

So they just hate neckbeards no matter what and just pretend it's because of the hat?

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