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Hats have been used as fashion statements about as far back as anyone can remember. In ancient times, the people used to protect their heads with scarves, leaves, or woven hat-type garments. Hats became part of the military uniform in the form of a helmet with all the insignia portraying which country or region was represented.

Today hats are still used for fashion, usefulness, and protection, and the use as insignia has broadened to the sports field. Baseball caps might have originally been invented to protect the players' eyes from the bright sunshine, but today the baseball cap is a representation of player and fan. From tiny little boys to aging grandfathers, baseball caps are an American tradition, whether or not they promote a team.

When building Hoover Dam in Nevada, workers put two baseball caps together, one facing forward and the other back, and dipped them in tar. Once they dried, they became what is known today as the hard hat. Not long after that clever invention, hard hats were mass produced to protect construction workers and the like from dangerous work environments.

Knit hats have been used for years in colder climates to protect the ears and head from winter winds and snow. Skiers made the ski hat popular as well as trendy, and today a wide variety of knit hats are available from plain colors, multi-colors, those with pompons, long night-caps, and many more. Cold weather hats, while still widely used for warmth, have become the fashionable look for skateboarders and the grunge crowd. Fashion or not, when the frigid winds begin to blow, a cozy knit hat pulled down over our ears is a wonderful thing.

Sun hats make many of us think of the matronly woman at the beach with seven or eight children at her heels, a colorful beach umbrella, a long beach robe, and a huge, floppy pink sun hat. While sun hats aren't always cute or fashionable, many are and besides, they protect our faces, necks and heads from what we now know are terribly damaging rays from the sun. In recent years, wide brimmed sun hats have become more fashionable, either woven from straw so they don't flop, or slightly smaller so they don't completely overcome the woman's head. Yet much like a hard hat, sun hats are more for functionality than style.

Perhaps no time in history represents the wearing of hats like the 1940s. The Dick Tracy style fedora is a standard that represents the era. Men and women alike dressed up regularly and had a hat to match. Hats were only worn by men out of doors, and women wore them to all formal or semi-formal occasions. Tiny pill box hats with veils, wide brimmed and odd shaped hats, and tall fancy hats. Thanks to the likes of Liza Doolittle, with formal headwear, anything goes.

Even if hats as fashion go out of style, we will always need hats for the usefulness and protection they provide. And as long as baseball is the great American pastime, the fashion part will always be around.