Wide Brims and Other Inyani Hayom

On Rosh Hashanah, while other people in shul were thinking about teshuva and repairing their souls, I was thinking about hats. (Not that it's easy to distract me, or anything).

What got me thinking about this was my friend's father, who sat in the row directly behind me. He is a learned and holy Jew from another generation with deep roots in Amshinov Chassidus. Yet, he was wearing a "black hat" that (a) wasn't black, and (b), had a brim that was about an inch wide.

When did hat brims grow to six inches and more? Is it a macho thing? And when did hats get all black? And when did straw hats become assur?

My father, z'l, was a very good looking man who was always a sharp dresser (although by no means a peacock; he did not fargin himself to spend a lot on his own clothes but was always neat and sharp). I don't recall him owning a black hat. He wore gray hats and brown hats and white straw hats in the summer. Now if you wear hats like that your children will never get shidduchim. (It's actually better not to wear a hat rather than wear a kofer hat).

Ironically, I get why Chassidim wear shtriemels and spudiks; you may not agree with it but at least there is a rational explanation (which causes me to remember my friend, a spudik-wearing Gerrer Chassid, who would, on hot summer Shabbasos, often lament "the Baal Shem Tov couldn't have come from Panama?"). But, sorry, I just don't get why the Yeshivish world went nuclear on the black hat front.