A beanie or Skully is a head-hugging brimless cap with or without a visor that was once popular among school boys.
Contents |
In the United States of America, beanies are made by triangular sections of cloth joined by a button at the crown and seamed together around the sides. They can also be made from leather and silk. In other English-speaking countries, a beanie is a knitted cap often woollen, known in the United States and Canada as a Tuque
The cloth covered button on the crown is about the size of a bean and may be the origin of the term "beanie," though some academics believe that the term is derived from a type of headgear worn in some medieval universities. The yellow hats ("bejaunus," that is, "yellowbill" later "beanus," a term used for both the hats and the new students) evolved into the college beanies of later years.[1] According to the Oxford Dictionary, the etymology is uncertain, but probably derives from the slang term "bean", meaning "head". In New Zealand, Australia, the term "beanie" is normally applied to a knit cap known as a tuque in Canada and parts of the US. The non-knitted variety is normally simply a "cap" in other countries.
In the United Kingdom, the term "Benny Hat" may also refer to this style of headcovering. This name originally comes from the character "Benny", played by actor Paul Henry in the 1970s British Crossroads Soap Opera, who always wore a knitted version of hat.
A larger variant of the skullcap, the beanie was a working hat associated with blue collar laborers, welders, mechanics, and other tradesmen who needed to keep their hair back but for whom a brim would be an unnecessary obstruction. Beanies do sometimes have a very small brim, less than an inch deep, around the brow front. The baseball cap evolved from this kind of beanie, with the addition of a brim to block the sun.
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. Lehigh University required freshmen to wear beanies, or "dinks," and other colleges including Franklin & Marshall, Gettysburg and Rutgers, may have had similar practices.[2] Benedictine College, in Atchison, KS, still carries this tradition for the first week of a freshman's classes. [3] It is the only college in the country to maintain this tradition. [4]
In the late 1940s, science fiction fanzine artist Ray Nelson (himself still in high school) adopted the use of the propeller beanie as emblematic shorthand for science fiction fandom, in self-mockery of the popular image of fans as childish and concerned with ephemera (i.e., science fiction); references to it are ironically now used to identify old-fashioned fans, as opposed to more modern fans of media SF. The propeller beanie increased in popular use through comics, and eventually made its way onto the character of Beany Boy of "Beany and Cecil." Today, computer savvy and other technically proficient people are sometimes pejoratively referred to as propellerheads thanks to the one-time popularity of the propeller beanie.[5]
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.
Another popular style is the oversized beanie which is adorned by stars like Zac Efron, Sienna Miller and Scarlett Johansson.