I can always tell that a trend has burst into the mainstream when I start to face the “What’s the deal with… ” questions.
For months now, readers, friends, even my brother have hit me with a new one: “What’s the deal with the hats with the upside-down words?”
And that’s all it is: a hat with “Nashville” or “Coffee” or “Mother” or “Drunk” stitched across the crown in an inverted arch.
That last one might make the most sense, following the logic that these are the headwear relatives of the groany boardwalk T-shirts that say, in upside-down script, “If you can read this, put me back on my bar stool”.
You can buy hats with “EBITDA” written upside down (what you’d wear, I guess, if your startup goes the way of Enron), hats with “Republican” upside down and hats with “Jesus” upside down.
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The capsized cap has particular purchase among pro athletes and those who track them.
Steph Curry has worn a cap with “Bay Area” inverted. Golfer Jose Luis Ballester wore an upside down “Sun Devils” hat as he shot his way through the Masters last year.
I’ve seen hats with inverted text for “Pebble Beach”, “Putt”, “Birdies” or the consciously droll “Golf”. Sorry, that is “Flog.” Kind of.
In the forest that is contemporary fashion, these hats occupy a branch with performance polos, Lululemon chinos and On sneakers.
Their target demo is a Barstool Sports reader, not a Balenciaga client.
That’s to say, they’re more merch than fashion. Their purpose isn’t to look interesting but to shout an interest. The tweaked text, like “Made ya look”, turns up the shout. Many are also green and cream.
The origin of many trends is hazy.
This one has a patient zero: True Brvnd, a Dallas company that claims to have invented the idea when it flipped its hometown, put it on hats and started selling them in 2020.
I can’t find evidence of an earlier inverted design, and based on Google Trends data, 2020 is when searches for “upside-down hat” begin to rise, so I will believe True Brvnd.
Sang Truong, the company’s founder, said the spark came from the feeling of unease in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I remember seeing this thing that says, ‘The world’s upside down,’” he said. “So I literally took the word ‘Dallas,’ and I flipped it upside down on a hat.”
Sales jumped when, through an acquaintance, he got the hat on Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott.
Klay Thompson and Dez Bryant have since worn “Sallad” hats. Truong has sold 600,000 hats, he said.
But the general concept has gone further. I’ve seen inverted text hats as far away as Paris.
New Era, the largest player in the fitted hat industry, now sells a range of caps with flipped team logos.
“Brands have popped up in the last year or two that if you go to their sites, the whole premise is an upside-down logo,” said Adam Herstig, the senior vice president of marketing and partnerships at Lids.
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Herstig, for his part, cited Kill The Hype, a streetwear label that appears to have been the first to sell hats with a flipped Los Angeles Dodgers logo, with convincing more labels to flip their logos.
Herstig noted that some sports teams had been more precious than others about futzing with their logos.
On the Lids website, you can find a hat with “New York” upside down but notably not a hat with the New York Yankees logo flipped.
“We think we could drive a lot of sales if we were able to do it across all teams, all leagues, but that’s not currently the case,” Herstig said.
These hats underline the thinking that fashion often isn’t about radical rethinks but small tweaks on styles we’ve known forever.
The inverted text, Truong said, “keeps it unique without going too crazy on the spectrum of, like, ‘Man, that’s out there’”.
He cited Virgil Abloh’s ethos that you only need to tweak an existing idea 3% to make something new. I doubt that Abloh was thinking about golf course apparel when he said that.
But it’s true that the inverted cap doesn’t overhaul the form or deviate in colour or pattern in an unsettling way.
It isn’t so wild that you’d arrive at the bar in one and look to your peers as if you were trying something, which is the true kiss of death in men’s fashion.
It tweaks one small thing: a word. And that is enough to make a trend. – ©2026 The New York Times Company/Jacob Gallagher
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
