Offices may vanish like men’s hats

Twenty years ago, I wrote a book about the death of men’s hats. A strange subject, yes. But I was curious. You’d see these photos of, say, men at a baseball game in the 1920s. A sea of identical straw hats. That uniformity vanished. Why?

I spent several years researching the topic — and no, it wasn’t John F. Kennedy. He was following the trend, not leading it. The Kennedy era is when people started to really notice the change.

What happened was this. There were two practical reasons for men to wear a hat: first, to keep warm; second, and most importantly, as a sign of social status. Hats were expensive, and a well-maintained hat showed its wearer as a man of means. Or not. “You get a couple of spots on your hat and you’re finished,” Willy Loman observes in the 1947 tragedy, “Death of a Salesman.”

That changed. Men weren’t waiting for streetcars and buses as much. They were in automobiles. Which had heaters. A fancy hat wasn’t needed to impress that clerk. Your credit card did the talking. After the practical uses eased, the social necessity followed. The bottom line: men wore hats because they had to, and once they didn’t have to, they stopped. For decades there was talk about hats coming back, but they never did and never will. They became superfluous, an occasional luxury.

Jump to 2023. This dynamic came tumbling back as I watched the latest round of businesses and government leaders vowing that their workers were coming back to the office. Any moment now. Three days a week. Or two. Or one. Starting soon. To enjoy that magic synchronicity that comes from being at the office. Lured by foosball and cocktail hours.

When the truth is, people went to the office because they had to. And now they don’t.

COVID, like Kennedy, drove home the new reality. Many people can do their jobs without ever setting foot in the office. Thanks to technology, smartphones and laptops, we can sit in our pajamas and process claims or design bridges or write columns.

Now look at going into an office. The average commute in Chicago is 32 minutes. An hour lost right there. Add in office chatterboxes, treks to Starbucks, restaurant lunches. You get more work done at home. Bosses tend to overvalue being in the office and under their watchful eye.

So stick a fork in offices, they’re done? I’m reluctant, first because predicting the future is always fraught. We didn’t see COVID coming, even when it was hammering on the door. Some are still on their tummies, pounding the floor with their fists, wailing that the government tried to do something to manage the deadly plague.

Second, I’m thinking of colleges. Like offices, schools shut down. But they sprang back. Kids really want to go to school. Why? They could study at home, the same way their parents work there.

Which leads to an intriguing puzzle: Working at home and studying at home are roughly the same dynamic — you’re by yourself, with a cat maybe, locked in cathectic focus on a screen.

What’s the difference? I almost said I have no idea, but it’s my job to make a good guess. It would seem a question of energy, youth, potential. Young people want to get to campus because they’re keen to be alive, go to classes, clubs, walk across the campus, drink beer, find romance. It’s an appealing dynamic that has them, or their parents, spending vast sums and traveling great distances.

Can we import that energy to adults working in offices? Should we? It seems stern commands and bowls of snacks aren’t enough. Realtors and city governments, like hat company owners and hatters union members in the early 1960s, are desperate to have workers start coming downtown regularly. Because they have a dog in this race: these office buildings with nobody in them. The solution right now seems to be to convert those into apartments and condos, but then that raises the question: what people would be moving downtown for? There are only so many times you can go to the Art Institute and the symphony.

Workers seem happy where they are. They aren’t rushing back. They might never go back. It might be a reality, like the disappearance of the fedora, far easier to accept than to change.