Download top and best high-quality free Beanie PNG Transparent Images backgrounds available in various sizes. To view the full PNG size resolution click on any of the below image thumbnail.

License Info: Creative Commons 4.0 BY-NC

A beanie is a head-hugging brimless cap fashioned from triangular panels of cloth linked at the crown by a button and seamed together around the sides in the United States. Beanies are often composed of cotton or felt material, although they can also be made of leather or silk. The name “beanie” refers to a knitted cap (typically woollen) that is also known as a “stocking cap” or “toque” in various parts of the United States and Canada.

During the early part of the twentieth century, a type of skullcap constructed of four or six felt panels sewed together to make the cap was a popular beanie design. To give them a unique and distinctive look, the panels were frequently made up of two or more different contrasting hues. Some universities and fraternities were also big fans of this style of beanie, which included school colors in the many panels that made up the headwear.

The whoopee cap, a moulded and pressed wool felted hat with a flipped up brim that created a band around the bottom of the cap, was another sort of beanie. Around the edge of the band, a decorative zig-zag or scalloped design was frequently cut. This gives the whoopee cap the appearance of a silly-looking crown made of cloth or knitted or crocheted yarn rather than costly metals like gold, silver, or platinum. The addition of buttons and pins to these designs of beanies was also fairly prevalent among schoolboys.

The beanie was a bigger version of the skullcap that was worn by blue-collar workers such as welders, mechanics, and other craftsmen who wanted to hold their hair back but didn’t want to be bothered with a brim. Beanies can have a very little brim around the brow front, less than an inch deep. With the addition of a visor to screen the sun, the baseball cap originated from this type of beanie.

Beanies had fallen out of favor as a hat by the mid-1940s, in favor of cotton visored hats like the baseball cap. They were, however, worn by college freshman and other fraternity initiates as a sort of light hazing in the 1950s and maybe afterwards. Freshmen at Lehigh University, for example, were compelled to wear beanies, or “dinks,” and similar procedures may have existed at other universities such as Franklin & Marshall, Gettysburg, Rutgers, Westminster College, and others. Benedictine Institution in Atchison, Kansas, is reported to be the only college in the United States to continue this practice for the first week of a freshman’s studies. RAT hats are still given to freshmen at Georgia Tech, despite the fact that they were no longer required to wear them in the 1960s. Wilson College maintains this practice as part of its “rivalry” between the Odd and Even class years.

Freshman beanies (also known as “dinks”) were popular at Cornell University until the early 1960s. Dinks were not mandatory, but students were forced to wear them due to peer pressure. The burning of the hats in a raucous bonfire was an annual tradition.

Download Beanie PNG images transparent gallery.