How many hats should a man own?
“As many as his closet can fit,” says Warbrit Russell Lowery, the owner of What-A-Hat, a casual and dress hat store for men and women at 611 Martin Luther King Boulevard in downtown Chattanooga.
Lowery, who served 20 years in the U.S. Navy followed by 14 years as a U.S. mail carrier in Cleveland, Tennessee, opened the store almost three years ago. He says it’s the only standalone hat store around. The closest one he knows of is in Nashville.
But it’s not unprecedented. From 1928 until 2002, Wormser Hats had a store on Market Street in downtown Chattanooga.
Lowery, 58, would window shop at Wormser’s in his youth after he got off work at the S&W Cafeteria, which for years was a downtown landmark.
Lowery is from an era in which everybody wore hats.
“In the ’50s and ’60s, that’s all we saw,” Lowery says. “I always knew that hats were part of our heritage – and that’s in the black and white communities.”
The stretch of Martin Luther King Boulevard where Lowery’s shop is located used to be called Ninth Street. Nicknamed the “Big Nine,” it was the heart of Chattanooga’s black community.
“My dad used to talk about how people walked up and down Ninth Street and everybody had on suits and hats,” says Maurice Jackson, who recently bought a hat from Lowery on his first visit to the store.
“You’re not dressed, unless you’ve got on a hat,” says Jackson, 56, who has a collection of casual hats for everyday wear and Sunday hats for church.
Lowery offers brands including Dorfman Pacific Co., Biltmore, Sinatra, Carlos Santana, Tommy Bahama, Stacey Adams and Kangol – the hat of choice for actor Samuel L. Jackson, a Chattanooga native. Rapper, actor and entrepreneur LL Cool J. is another fan of Kangol hats, Lowery says.
Lowery also sells baseball caps that pay homage to black history, including the Tuskegee Airmen, who flew fighter and bomber planes during WWII combat missions.
Hats had a resurgence starting about a decade ago, he says.
“I didn’t start seeing a desire for hats until the early 2000s,” Lowery says. “The younger people started to bring it in as a trend. It’s trendy.”
While Lowery has the latest fashions, he also stocks hats which saw their popularity peak years ago, such as over-sized, all-leather newsboy-style hats that date back to the days of disco and leisure suits.
“This is called the ‘Big Apple,'” Lowery says, holding one up.
Jackson says, “I got a friend who still wears them.”