It Was 20 Years Ago Today...

…That David Bernstein of the Volokh Conspiracy wore his baseball cap with the brim facing backwards:

Who would have thought that twenty years after I, as a teenager, thought it looked cool to put my baseball cap on backwards (was it a Beastie Boys thing? Who remembers…), that youths, and even some adults (saw a guy in his 30s yesterday), would still be doing it (though there seemed to be a break for a time in the late ’80s and mid ’90s). Folks, the bill is on the front for reason, to shade your face from the sun. And it’s soooo unclassy. Can you imagine Cary Grant wearing a backwards baseball cap? Please ladies, boycott the gents who wear the cap backwards, or at least tell them how silly it looks, and end this travesty for good. Perhaps a simple, “you know, David Bernstein had that look twenty years ago,” will do.

Too bad this unwitting celebrity fashion victim and his army of media handlers such as this Reuters journalist never got the memo:

The president-elect, looking uber-cool with his White Sox baseball cap on backwards, flipped the shaka to a crowd of about 30 people as he left a gym on a Marine Corps base on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, where he is vacationing.

As Jonah Goldberg noted last week, American society–let alone the rest of the world–is far too balkanized for such a blanket statement. And in such a diverse environment, news agencies such as Reuters need to mindful of such a wide range of readers. In other words, we all know that one man’s uber-cool fashion plate is another man’s uber-dork. To be frank, it adds little to the national dialogue to call the attack on the basketball courts by the president elect an uber-cool aesthetic experience.