Beret/hat: A social and symbolic dichotomy in 20th century Spain

Abstract

This article explores the symbolic dimension of the beret and the hat in the social history of twentieth-century Spain. The use of a wide range of iconographic and hemerographic material—pictures, newspaper sketches, advertisement posters, films and journalistic chronicles—enables us to reconstruct the allegorical class struggle waged by the beret and the hat as common head coverings of the popular and middle/upper classes respectively, at least until the mid-century, when their popularity began to decline. The article also addresses two variables of great importance in the development of this clothing dichotomy: generational and genre factors, which became crucial in the adoption of transgressive attitudes identified with the hatless movement in the 1930s. Although the connecting thread of the article is the relationship of power and submission that revolves around the beret and the hat, it also considers some significant cases in which the choice of one head covering or the other responded to an «elective» principle on the part of its wearer, and not to the socially selective function usually linked to the use of these garments.