Flat caps were almost universally worn in the 19th century by working class men throughout Britain and Ireland, and versions in finer cloth were also considered to be suitable casual countryside wear for upper-class English men (hence the contemporary alternative name golf cap). Flat caps were worn by fashionable young men in the 1920s.
The stereotype of the flat cap as purely "working class" was never correct. They were frequently worn in the country, but not in town, by middle- and upper-class males for their practicality. Mather says: "A cloth cap is assumed in folk mythology to represent working class, but it also denotes upper class affecting casualness. So it is undoubtedly classless, and there lies its strength. A toff can be a bit of a chap as well without, as it were, losing face."[3] When worn by an upper-class gentleman, it is sometimes referred to as a slummers' cap. The British workman no longer commonly wears a flat cap, so in the twenty-first century, it has gained an increasingly upper-class image. In Britain though the flat cap is frequently worn as part of an "urban" or "street" look favoured by the working classes.
