BBQ Chef's Hat

After World War II, many newly affluent Americans flocked to the tropics, visiting Pacific islands, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia, as well as warm places closer to home, including Mexico, California, Hawaii, and Florida. People developed a taste for casual living and the distinctive local foods and drink. Returning home, they re-created these experiences in their new suburban backyards, with patios, tropical drinks, and the grill, where they cooked meals craved by a postwar meat-mad America.

By the late 1950s, American manufacturers and retailers were promoting new tools, clothes, furniture, and serving ware to go along with grilled meals on the patio. Just as the lust for the tropical life inspired experimentation in food and drink (in what we ate and who cooked it), clothing took a tropical turn in the 1950’s and 1960’s, especially in menswear. The aloha shirt, with its tropical motifs from Hawaii and the cool cotton guayabera from the Caribbean, topped the more casual shorts (Bermuda) that men had traded in from their long pants. Summer grillers, through the ‘60’s at least, even had barbecue/grilling shirts, hats, and aprons developed for them, outfits that often poked gentle fun at the aspiring backyard chefs. Aprons, in particular, often carried titles that boasted of the culinary accomplishments of these Daddios of the Patio, these Grill Masters. Others joked about the wearer’s presumed interests in both alcohol and women.

Others, like the hat pictured here, around 1965, which went with a shirt of the same design, pictured the new tools and possessions, even food and drinks of the new life on the patios, decks, and lanais. This chef’s hat, a modified version of the classic French chef’s toque blanche (white hat) and its matching shirt pictured watermelon, pickles, skewers of meat (shish kebabs/Shish-ka-bobs), grill racks with steaks and hot dogs, spatulas, flippers, and even corn on the cob on its decorative design.

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