NikeCourt AeroBill featherlight tennis cap
>$24, Buy now at Nike
On its face, this Nike hat is the furthest thing from notable. It’s plain black, designed for tennis, and made from a techy performance nylon. As nondescript as it gets. Too actual-dad-ish to even be considered a dad hat. The kind of thing superheroes wear when they’re trying to keep a low profile. But when no less than five (!) of your fashion magazine colleagues start showing up to the office in them on the regular? Well, that’s something worth investigating.
The routes by which my coworkers arrived at the Nike caps were different—one came across his in a tennis store while styling our recent shoot with rising star Frances Tiafoe; I overheard another mention he originally bought his to run in. But the reasons they all swear by the Nike DriFit cap are roughly the same. For one: it weighs next to nothing. It’s no coincidence that the cap started popping up more frequently in the middle of summer, when the average temperature in New York sits at holy-hell-it-feels-like-a-Russian-bathhouse degrees. In that sort of punishing humidity, a normal cotton twill hat might as well be an Irish wool sweater. The sweat-wicking, light-as-air properties of these Nike joints make for an altogether more comfortable commute.
And from a style perspective? The aforementioned nondescriptness is sort of the point. Turns out, a black hat with a simple white Swoosh happens to work with everything. It makes perfect sense with minimalist fits, can help lock down a bunch of wild competing patterns, and—as one GQ fashion editor pointed out—looks unexpectedly great with a suit, knocking some of the inherent fustiness out of the equation.
One last nice thing: the Nike hat only costs $24, which means you can afford to find out if dressing like you work at GQ is all it’s cracked up to be.
With all due respect to your Japanese selvedge, there's only one pair of pants we'd trust to get us through a job interview, park hang, and first date in the span of a single day.
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