Vintage Trucker Hats Are My Roman Empire
and the shops with the best ones
I don’t have anything poetic or profound to say about my newfound obsession with vintage trucker hats, but I am surprised it’s taken me this long to fully embrace them. There’s a novelty about them that screams souvenir while also capturing a place in time. This can be true of a lot of things, I suppose, but the retro vignettes and branding laid on this medium specifically just draws me in. And despite most of them being way too large on my undersized head, they still somehow manage to make any outfit of mine look 100x cooler.
It all started a couple months ago when I was on Tiktok (I have since deleted my profile and the app on my phone… that story is for another time) and saw a photo of these girls having a cookout in South Lake Tahoe and I just loved their vibe — so much that I screenshot it and added it to my vision board. They were outdoorsy but not crunchy, cool but not pretentious — clearly ‘70s country intertwined with an air of hippie-ness. I had an epiphany of sorts, realizing this kind of look felt more “me” than anything I’ve seen on influencers or internet persons in quite a long time.
From here, I started looking into vintage trucker hats and came across my first purchase: This Kansas Farmer hat (Since I am from Kansas and my family owns a farm back home, one could say it was meant to be). I then purchased this orange hat advertising Bannon’s Mountain, a tourist compound of sorts outside of Corinth, New York, of which you can still rent on VRBO. I loved the bright orange color with the illustrative motif patch. I thought it went well with my vintage brown leather jacket and pair of red and orange work pants.
I also bought this ‘90s California trucker hat and this satin blue one, both from Depop. The most recent purchase, though, is this 1980s navy satin trucker hat made for Briarwood Farms in Alma, Kansas (which is a 2-hour drive northeast of my hometown).
But I could have bought 100 more if my husband wouldn’t have thought me insane (more crazy than he already pegs me to be, at least). So here are a list of the other vintage hats I wish I could have bought, but didn’t:
Pepsi Logo Satin Hat, $29
(Also, this guy on Depop as the best collection of vintage trucker hats — and perhaps the most extensive: There are more than 4,500 listed.)
And paying tribute to my Tiktok girlies who sparked this fixation, here are a couple of outfits styled with my new (old) hats I think they would approve of:
