Hat Revolution

So, in 1925, the fez hat gets banned in Turkey, and in 1929, what do we have? Well, Black Thursday, right? So, yeah, and across the Ottoman Empire, in parts of North Africa, the fez hat is widely worn.

So then, in 1925, when they banned the fez hat in Turkey, under Mustafa Atarak, the Turkish Republic passed what is called the Hat Law as part of its program of clothing and social reforms.

The fez hat was replaced in official Turkish public dress by Western-style hats.

So the period from the Ottoman dress reform of 1829 to the Turkish hat law of 1925 covered approximately 96 years of wearing the fez hat.

I find it remarkable that the hat was so specific that they passed laws about it, right? So we left off then in 1925, right, the Turkish hat law of 1925.

And in the 1920s and the 30s, the American top hat started to disappear.

Anyway, so yeah.

So when we travel for business, the Fez hat goes away.

The formal law follows quickly.

On the 25th of November 1925, the Grand National Assembly passes the Hat Law, Şapka Kanunu, mandating that men wear hats with brims and, more pointedly, criminalizing the wearing of the fez.

The penalties are not symbolic.

Individuals who defy the law can face imprisonment, and in the months that follow, the state enforces it with a severity that startles even some of its own supporters.

In several towns, Rize, Erzurum, Maraş, and others, men who publicly resist the law, sometimes organizing protests or simply refusing compliance out of religious conviction, are arrested, tried in the independence tribunals that have been given sweeping authority to suppress threats to the new order, and in a number of documented cases, executed.

It is a detail that sits uncomfortably alongside the language of modernization and progress that surrounds the reform in official rhetoric, the recognition that a law about hats, of all things, could carry a sentence of death for its most stubborn opponents.

But Mustafa Kemal has come to see resistance to the Hat Law not as a matter of personal preference over fashion, but as a proxy battle for the entire reform project, a test case that will determine whether the state's will can override entrenched custom anywhere it chooses, and he is not willing to lose that test.

For most of the population, though, compliance comes not through executions in distant tribunals, but through the mundane pressure of social and economic reality.