Animal Hats on Adults: Our Most Ridiculous Fashion Trend

What’s up with the adult women wearing animal hats?

Have you seen this fashion trend? It’s been super popular in the United States and the United Kingdom the last few years.

I see this all the time. Young women wearing these bizarre kiddie hats – sometimes even when it’s warm outside. This is one fashion trend I would really like to see die in 2021.

If by some odd chance you haven’t seen these hats, they are like a combination of a hood and a hat, often covering the head and the neck. Some have an attached scarf as well that leads to “paws” that double as gloves. They seem to come in a variety of animal types including zebras, penguins, raccoons, koala bears, and tigers.

You see this not only on college kids, but young professionals and famous celebrities like Laura Prepon from “Orange Is the New Black”.

It’s super cute when a baby or a toddler wears these hats. After all, kids’ clothing is often whimsical with little animals, trucks, action figures, and ruffles.

But adults in animal hats? That’s not cute at all.

Occasionally you see a young guy wearing these hats, but mostly they seem to be fashionable among younger women, maybe age 25 and younger.

It made me wonder: why do young women want to dress up like babies? Is it a way to keep a grasp on our youth?

The U.K.’s Guardian newspaper pondered this very question. Author Hadley Freeman noted:

“There is no question that there is plenty of pressure out there on women to maintain their youth and never look a day past 25. At times, this pressure becomes so exaggerated and so ubiquitous that its message is that women should basically look like children. This is what lies behind the ridiculous standards of thinness expected of women in the public eye, rendering them closer in appearance to 12-year-olds than 32-year-olds. To make a woman look like a child is to make her unthreatening, helpless and worthy of condescension. When women dress like children, they encourage this attitude.”

Some people have stated that the hats are just intended to be fun and playful. A way for adults to reconnect with the whimsey of their youth. Youth is one thing, but do we need to reconnect with our inner babies?

I have many issues with these ridiculous animal head hats.

First, they are ugly. A real panda bear or penguin is cute but these things? They look like weird taxidermy rejects. Sometimes you can’t even tell what animal the hat is supposed to represent because they’re just a mess of fur and ears.

Second, they look cheap. It looks like you couldn’t afford a real hat and just picked up the first thing you saw in the bins at the Goodwill. They are totally tacky. Unless you’re a baby.

Third, the fake fur versions of these hats are toxic. You don’t need a bunch of synthetic fur on your head. Fake fur is made with synthetic fibers and non-renewable petroleum which harms the environment. Since these fibers don’t break down, they end up in landfills leaching toxins into the ground. In some people, fake fur can cause issues such as allergic skin reactions.

Fourth, back to the point made in the Guardian article, they lead to the infantilism of young women. That's what bugs me the most about this fashion trend.

Women have worked hard over the last hundred years or so to be taken seriously. Women struggled to break ground in their careers and move beyond the so-called female professions of nursing, teaching, and cleaning.

How am I supposed to take a lawyer or a financial planner seriously if they’re wearing a big green frog on their head?

It took many years and a lot of blood sweat and tears for women to not be treated as children under the law. It wasn’t until the late 1970s when women were widely available to get credit and property in their own names.

Domestic violence and spousal rape laws that assert that women are not property are a relatively recent addition to our judicial system, and still not as strictly enforced as they could be.

The bottom line is that grown women wearing these hats look like they’re trying to be kids. We all go through periods where we don’t want to grow up. After all, adulting is hard. I still struggle with it thirty-five years after I became a legal adult.

Young women, I implore you: don’t wear things that make people take you less seriously than you already experience.

And also, those hats are just ugly. Leave the ugly hats for the babies.