If I’m known for anything at this point, it’s probably having a lot of thoughts about various cultural ephemera. It should be obvious, then, that I Have Opinions about the Happy Gilmore baseball cap that Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce was spotted wearing at Coachella this weekend—while flanked by his girlfriend, a little-known musician by the name of Taylor Swift, natch. While Swift has been erring on the preppy side for her recent outings with Kelce, her paramour has been dabbling in the exciting world of custom all-black Amiri and Collina Strada cargos, but let’s be real: Kelce is a jock, albeit an extremely sweet-seeming and giant-friendly-bear-coded one, so the baseball cap was inevitable.
Let me be clear: I am the furthest thing from anti-baseball cap. I love baseball caps, and have been inspired to mix them into my going-out wear ever since I saw that one picture of Meryl Streep wearing one with a corset while rehearsing The Taming of the Shrew in 1978. My mom’s vintage Les Liaisons Dangereuses baseball cap is one of my most treasured possessions, as is the “Samantha Jones PR” hat I once lost at Disneyland and forced my boyfriend to retrieve for me from the park lost-and-found. I simply believe that the nature of the cap one wears can tell us a lot about the soul of the wearer, so let’s get our Kremlinology on with Kelce’s hat, shall we?
Admittedly, it’s a confusing time for baseball caps in menswear. Of late, the fellas have been encouraged to wear hats bearing the name of female authors, which sounds good in theory, but in real life, if I meet a man wearing a hat that reads LYDIA DAVIS, I’m throwing up on him. (I love Davis’s writing more than I can express, but that doesn’t mean I want to turn into a walking billboard for her work. Heed my words, single friends; a man who performatively wears a ZADIE SMITH baseball cap to meet you for a first date will eventually screw you over.) No, a hat that reads Happy Gilmore isn’t necessarily erudite, but it’s also…legit, in a way that the Brooklyn-based autofiction heads could never touch.
I haven’t seen Happy Gilmore since I was a tween, but I have to hand it to Kelce: It is absolute peak golden retriever-boyfriend behavior to wear a hat emblazoned with the name of a 1996 Adam Sandler movie that holds a 62% score on Rotten Tomatoes to a highly publicized event in the California desert with your extremely famous girlfriend. Not even a prestige Sandler movie like Uncut Gems, but Happy Gilmore! God bless this sweet, simply accessorized man, and may angels light his path toward the Coachella VIP section.
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