'Hate landlords': Slogan baseball caps are turning heads on social media

A specter haunts social media: the specter of socially responsible youth wearing slogan baseball caps whose messages are tailored to the moment.

Top of the list is a £20 black cap emblazoned with "Hate Landlords" stitched in white, sold through the left-leaning media organization Novara.

It is closely followed by Pasadena Leisure Club's "Stay off my day off" embroidered cap, a phrase which in some ways speaks more broadly to workers' rights (albeit for £55), and in along the same lines, a blue cap emblazoned with "I don't work here" sold by Idea bookshop, a popular London retailer on the fashion left. This cap also exists in white.

All anti-capitalist caps – “anti-caps”, if you will – sell for good, depending on where they are stocked. But it was the Hate Landlords hat that captured the mood.

"Political merchandising has always been a way to vent frustration or look the other way of the medal: hope," says Vicky Spratt, housing journalist and author of the book Tenants. "Having a slogan on a cap that expresses the frustration felt by so many renters today may seem like a niche, but it 'is incredibly universal."

The cap started out as a joke, says Gary McQuiggin, Novara's video manager, who came up with the idea. It snowballed into something much more charged, he says, because it “taps into a sense of exasperation that many tenants feel, where your material situation declines, the country itself declines, and there is this person to whom you give away a huge chunk of your salary and in many cases they don't do much to earn it" .

Spratt agrees, likening the disparity between wages and rent to "the Sisyphean experience of rolling a rock up a hill only to see it roll back down."< /p>

Slogan t-shirts have been an expression of wearer values ​​for years. First popularized in the late 1960s by Mr Freedom, who sold Donald Duck Disney t-shirts on Kings Road in London, it was Vivienne Westwood in the 1970s and Katharine Hamnett in the 1980s who gave their a more political bent. An image of Hamnett meeting Margaret Thatcher in a "58% Don't Want Pershing" t-shirt, referencing US nuclear missiles, featured in newspapers and magazines around the world. The designer's choice of clothing marked a historic moment that might otherwise have been forgotten.

As long as there have been revolutionary policies, there have been revolutionary images. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament logo lent itself perfectly to clothing, and the Che Guevara t-shirt became so ubiquitous that it was almost entirely stripped of its political significance.

The choice of the cap, which is so closely associated with streetwear, is the logical continuation of the wear slogan. "Baseball caps are fun, but they're also functional," says Spratt. "Wearing something isn't just about fashion - it's a reflection of the situation."

Neither McQuiggin nor Spratt thinks slogan caps have the power to change the situation. The irony of spending money on an anti-capitalist movement is not lost on Spratt. "On the one hand, you need £20 in the first place," she says. But it's not just about selling something, it's about taking a mood, making it easy to access, and putting it into action to raise awareness. "Sometimes all you need is a little catharsis and that's it," says McQuiggin.