This story originally appeared in the 2025 Locals’ Guidebook featuring the Best of Jackson Hole. Pick up a copy today!
JACKSON, Wyo. — Picture this: It’s a glorious summer day on Jackson’s historic Town Square. You’ve just spent some considerable dough on a beautiful new cowboy hat. You can’t wait to show it off, but you’re wondering if you’re allowed to wear it out to dinner.
To purchase a cowboy hat is to buy into a rich history and culture that is upheld by certain etiquette guidelines. These rules are rarely spelled out for new hat owners; usually they are learned through observation and osmosis:
- Never touch another person’s hat.
- Remove the hat when indoors, and during the National Anthem.
- When being introduced to a lady, remove or tip your hat.
- Keep your hat off of the bed. It’s bad luck.
- When removing your hat, always place it on the crown rather than the brim. Ideally, find a hat rack.
To help out the uninitiated, we interviewed two prolific hat-wearers who model best practices: Kate Mead (lawyer, rancher) and Bruce Hayse (medical doctor).
Mead, who estimates that her hat collection includes 10 to 12 dome-toppers, places a special emphasis on rule No. 5. She says she can spot a cowboy hat neophyte based on where and how they set the hat down, which can impact its overall shape. When she sees someone storing their hat brimside-down on their car’s dashboard in the sun, that’s a dead giveaway. That hat will likely shrink, and maybe warp.
“My pet peeve is when they are not shaped,” Mead says. “A cowboy hat that is well-shaped really tends to accent whatever feature on a person — it really makes them look good. These hats they buy off the rack? They’re flat.”
Mead suspects that the hats’ rise in popularity has something to do with the “Yellowstone” suite of television shows. She adds that they come in handy in certain cosmetic capacities.
“I do think a lot of men wear hats because they’re balding,” Mead says. “Sometimes, if I’m having a bad hair day, I’ll throw on a cowboy hat to go to the grocery store.”
Dr. Hayse contends that cowboy hats tend to look better on women than on men. He’s seen the hat trends come and go over his four decades in the valley.
“I put away all of my hats when I moved to Jackson 45 years ago because I didn’t want to look like a tourist,” Hayse says. “We’ve come so far from any idea of there actually being cowboys around Jackson, you don’t have to worry about being pretentious and thinking the real cowboys will get mad at you.”
Hayse places less stock in the Kevin Costner theory, instead characterizing the recent rise in popularity as a “postmodernist type of phenomenon,” suggesting that as the culture has “moved far enough away from the original meaning of the hat that people can make whatever they want out of it,” he says. “I don’t know if [Jacques] Derrida ever wrote about cowboy hats.” Editor’s note: We haven’t found anything yet.
Hayse sees this exemplified in Jackson’s preponderance of bankers and real estate agents who sport cowboy hats in business meetings and upscale restaurants. He remembers fondly the days when his pal Richard “Gator” Rawley embodied ideal cowboy hat flair.
“Gator could wear a hat with real style,” Hayse says. “He was one of those guys who stood up totally straight. That’s how he’d do it: Put your chest out a little ways and take big strides down the street.”
