Today might just be democracy’s greatest milestone. Thanks to a few dedicated hat fanatics and the Australian public, we all now have the opportunity to don a corduroy cap immortalising iconic Australian music program, rage.
@hatsgreatesthits is an Instagram account dedicated to archiving the greatest hats that this country has to offer. Their museum of hats is quite frankly, unparalleled. Think gorgeous aquamarine Bad Boy caps, and tastefully battered merchandise from the 2000s Sydney Olympic Games featuring our dear friends Syd, Olly, and Millie. Decades of Australian history captured forever in a series of dad caps.
The account recently launched a mammoth petition, beckoning rage to re-release their stunning black embroidered corduroy logo cap. Using the power of Instagram, @hatsgreatesthits rallied up the troops and accomplished one of the most well-executed campaigns we’ve ever witnessed.
As all good democracies should, @hatsgreatesthits posed a question to their loyal followers, which archival hat would the public like to see remade? 20,000 votes were cast and the landslide favourite was a black corduroy Rage hat.
A petition was launched on change.org, its mission statement was simple, “WE DEMAND THE ABC PRODUCE A RANGE OF RAGE CORD CAPS.”
“It’s a win-win proposition – the ABC will make a stack of cash to fund original Australian content, and the public will have a magnificent piece of headwear to rock on their melons.”
Australian musicians soon jumped on board, Brisbane heroes Ball Park Music shared the plight of @hatsgreatesthits on an Instagram story, beckoning fans to jump onboard the cause. “We believe this could be the most important hat of the year,” the band wrote.
Whilst this nations pop princess duo The Veronicas expressed their complete dismay over never receiving a highly-coveted hat. “Why weren’t we given the Rage hats?”, the sisters wrote in an Instagram comment.
To add fuel to the fire, the account implored their followers to spam the comment section of a Rage Instagram post with hat emojis — thousands joined in, resulting in a sea of blue that would bring a tear to Joni Mitchell’s eye.
Today, the efforts of the Australian public and Australia’s Best Hats Official finally came into fruition. An individual representing the account was invited to the triple j studios to talk to Ben and Liam about the campaign. It was there that triple j revealed they had made the decision to reprint the rage cap.
“after two months of campaigning, thousands of comments on Rage’s page and upwards of 100k blue hat emojis WE HAVE WON OUR BIGGEST BATTLE TO DATE,” the account shared in a recent post.
“A huge thank you to every hat enthusiast who participated in this campaign – this has been by far our most difficult campaign to date, and I won’t lie I was beginning to doubt that the ABC was going to crack under the pressure.
“BUT IT JUST GOES TO SHOW THE POWER OF THE RAPIDLY GROWING AUSTRALIAN HAT ENTHUSIAST COMMUNITY – together we are changing the face of the nations lid fashion AND WE WILL NOT STOP UNTIL EVERY ICONIC INSTITUTION RELEASES A MAGNIFICENT CORDUROY CAP.”
