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Chabad Chic

The black hat and the maxi skirt have their day

by
Marc Tracy
May 03, 2011
What you could see on the street this summer.(Tablet Magazine Art Department)
What you could see on the street this summer.(Tablet Magazine Art Department)

In a perhaps inevitable development, The Hipsters, who lo these many years have resided in Brooklyn in close proximity to The Ultra-Orthodox, have adopted the signature black headgear as their own. “Called either a ‘black hat’ or Borsalino, for the style’s most famous and expensive brand, the simple hat is most commonly associated with ultra-Orthodox non-Hasidic Jews, as well as members of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, the Hasidic group based in Crown Heights,” the Times reports. “But in recent months, the quasi-religious hat has not only popped up on the other side of Williamsburg, where skinny jeans and canvas sneakers still rule, but also in Cole Haan advertisements as a secular fashion accessory.”

This seems like a nice thing, as long as fashion-world balkanization isn’t totally abolished: As you can see from our custom-built image, the rise of the foot-length maxi skirt as this summer’s defining silhouette has some potentially dangerous implications if you are fearful of a hipster-hasidic supernova-esque clash.

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.