Silly Hats for Any Event

Beanie is the name for two distinct types of cap or hat. The name "beanie" probably comes from the early-20th century slang term "bean," meaning "head".

The beanie cap is typically made of wool felt, and was popular amongst school age boys from the 1920s to the early 1940s. Beanies are brimless and either have a small embellished visor or, more commonly, no visor at all.

One popular style of the beanie during the early half of the twentieth century was a skullcap made of four or six felt panels sewn together to form the cap. The panels were often composed of two or more different colors to make them novel. This type of beanie was also very popular with college fraternities as they would often incorporate school colors into the beanie.

Another style of beanie was a formed and pressed wool hat with a flipped up brim that formed a band around the bottom of the cap. The band would often have a decorative repeating zig-zag or scalloped pattern cut around the edge. It was also quite common for schoolboys to adorn their beanies with buttons and pins.

By the mid 1940s, beanies fell out of popularity as a hat in favor of cotton visored caps like the baseball cap although in the 1950s and possibly beyond, they were worn by college freshmen and various fraternities as a form of mild hazing.Excerpt from "The GI Bill", by Michael D. Haydock Mentions the practice of requiring freshmen to wear beanies (or "dinks") at Lehigh University. Recollections found on-line also mention Franklin & Marshall, Gettysburg and Rutgers Colleges, etc.

In the early 1990s, the beanie saw a reemergence in popularity due to the "grunge" clothing trend as well as the popularization of snowboarding and other cold weather sports activities. The modern beanie is usually made of fleece, or special synthetic material that wicks moisture away. Woven versions, resembling tobogganing caps, are also popular sportswear accessories for winter sports?such as snowboarding.

The fez (, plural fezzes or fezes[http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fez Fez in Merriam-Webster's online dictionary]), or Tarboosh ????? (Egyptian version), is a red felt hat in the shape of a truncated cone.

Category: File - :William Merritt Chase Keying up.jpg|thumb|right|Depiction of a jester by William Merritt Chase

A jester, joker, jokester, fool, wit-cracker, prankster or buffoon was a person employed to tell jokes and provide general entertainment, typically by a European monarch. Jesters are stereotypically thought to have worn brightly colored clothes and eccentric hats in a motley pattern. Their hats were especially distinctive; made of cloth, they were floppy with three points, each of which had a jingle bell at the end. The three points of the hat represent the donkey's ears and tail worn by jesters in earlier times. Other things distinctive about the jester were his laughter and his mock sceptre, known as a bauble or marotte.