Back To America 2.0: How a 1988 Comedy Became Our Best Selling Crown

The Back To America crown is the best selling thing we have ever made. Not the HBCU work, which is the biggest part of the business. Not the collaborations with names you would recognise. A plaid dad hat.

People ask why. The answer is that it is not really a hat about plaid.

Petals on a sidewalk. The whole film in one image.

Summer of 1988

In June 1988 a film came out about an African prince who leaves a palace where servants scatter rose petals under his feet, and goes to Queens to find a woman who will love him for himself. He takes a job scrubbing floors. He lives in a building with a broken everything. He tells nobody who he is.

Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall played half the neighborhood between them. It made a fortune. But that is not why it lasted.

It lasted because it is one of the very few films from that decade where Black wealth, Black royalty, Black beauty and Black comedy all sit in the same frame without any of them being the punchline. The joke is never the people. The joke is the distance between where he came from and where he landed, and everybody in the theatre understood both ends of it.

Thirty-eight years later people still quote it word for word at cookouts. Say the barbershop argument out loud in the right room and watch how many people finish it for you.

Why plaid

Red, green, gold. The uniform, close up.

If you know the film you already know the plaid. It is the uniform. It is the counter, the paper hat, the shift the prince takes because he wants to earn something honestly for the first time in his life. The whole comic engine of that stretch of the movie is a man with unlimited money choosing to mop a floor.

We did not want to print a picture of anything. Anybody can put a still on a tee and call it homage. We wanted the fabric to do the work, so that the people who know, know, and everybody else just sees a very good plaid cap.

That is the whole design brief. Recognition without explanation.

What 2.0 actually changed

The first run taught us what people did with it. They wore it hard. They wore it in the rain. They wore it until the brim went soft, and then they came back and asked for another one, which is the best and most annoying compliment a product can pay you.

So the second version is built for that. Not reissued. Rebuilt.

The leather enclosure is the detail we get asked about most. It costs us more than a snapback closure and it is the first thing people touch when they pick the hat up. That is not an accident. A cap is a small object and the fastenings are where cheapness announces itself.

The printed interior is the same argument. Nobody buying it can see it in a photograph. You find it after it is already yours.

What it is really about

We have been making headwear since 2008, and the thing we keep coming back to is that a good product carries a reference the way a person carries a memory. Lightly. Without needing to announce it.

Back To America is a nod to a film that told a generation we could be royalty and hilarious and in love and in Queens, all at once, with no apology and no explaining. We built a plaid cap because that is the piece of it we could put on somebody's head.

You do not have to have seen the movie. Plenty of people who buy it have not. It is still the best plaid cap you will own.

The Dungeon