Iowa Hats

Iowa is the state people mix up with Idaho and Ohio. The confusion goes back to at least the 1980s: a 1970s Iowa City sweatshirt read "University of Iowa, Idaho City, Ohio," and a White House wedding invitation once went to "Pocatello, Iowa." These Iowa hats take the other side of that joke and wear the pride in being the place nobody can find. The designs run on the real texture of the state. Casey's breakfast pizza, with scrambled eggs and cheese sauce or sausage gravy, is the gas station order people defend, and a Des Moines Register poll put Casey's first for 85 percent of respondents. The loose meat sandwich traces to Sioux City in 1924 and the first Maid-Rite in Muscatine in 1926. The driver's two fingers lifted off the steering wheel are the farmer wave, which an Iowa governor once honored with a Farmer Wave Week. The Butter Cow, first carved in 1911 from about 600 pounds of butter, is a State Fair fixture, and the fair sold more than 3,000 Butter Cow Security shirts after a vandalism scare. RAGBRAI and the corn jokes round out the set. IS THIS HEAVEN? NO, IT'S IOWA is the line already printed on Iowa apparel elsewhere, and it gets a second colorway here alongside the Casey's pizza hat. Every design is custom embroidered on an unstructured dad hat, for the Iowan at home or the one who moved away and still waves at every truck.