A flat cap, also variously called a "cloth cap," "golf cap," "driving cap," "windsor cap," and others, is a round, soft men's cap with a small brim in front and a somewhat stiff peak in the back. The material is usually wool or tweed.
The style can be traced all the way back to fourteenth century England. In its current style the caps were worn in the nineteenth century by working-class men, and it was considered casual country wear by well-to-do English men; hence the alternate name "golf cap." Boys in Britain and North America of all classes wore this cap in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; the popular image of the cap is its being worn by "newsboys." Cloth caps were worn by fashionable young men in the 1920s. The style has remained popular among certain people in Europe and America. Today it is sometimes associated with old men. Some males began wearing flat caps backwards in the 1990s.
See also Gatsby cap.
