What makes pink cowboy hats irresistible to an Irish audience? Blame Garth Brooks

I have a theory. It’s unproven and untested. But I believe it to be sound.

In 2014 a nation held its breath as we waited for the hammer to fall on whether Garth Brooks would get the go-ahead to play his five nights at Croke Park. It was a news event so monumental that I believe it will join the annals of Irish legend along with Fionn Mac Cumhaill building the Giant’s Causeway and the Children of Lir doomed to live for centuries as swans. In thousands of years children will be told of a powerful being from a land called America who made great promises to the people of Ireland.

However, when Garth of Brooks was told he could not have five nights with the Irish people, only three, he smote the Elders with an axe called Guitar and said he would not sing a single note as punishment. (Brooks’s triumphant return to Croke Park in 2022 and his newly announced 2027 tour probably won’t make it into the legend because the misery is just more interesting.)

My theory: it is Garth Brooks and those cancelled shows that are singularly responsible for Irish audiences’ deep and abiding love of a pink cowboy hat.

If you’ve attended a concert in Ireland in the past decade, especially one on a large scale, you’ll have noticed fans decked out in pink cowboy hats. The hats can vary slightly in form and texture – maybe there’s a chin strap, a rhinestone, or a feathered rim – but they are always there. Sometimes the hats make some sense: at a Taylor Swift concert as a nod to her country beginnings or at a Harry Styles show where camp costumes are the norm. But what about the pink cowboy hats at AC/DC? Or Metallica? What makes them irresistible to an Irish audience?

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My theory posits that the 2014 Garth Brooks fiasco left a glut of unofficial merchandise sitting in warehouses, garages and vans across Dublin, the bulk of it cowboy hats and the majority of them pink. But why pink? Well, the Venn diagram of Irish women attending a Brooks concert and Irish women who’d already donned a pink cowboy hat at a hen party would likely form a perfect circle, so savvy merchandisers knew they could count on sales based on familiarity.

The same unofficial hat and scarf merchants rightly predicted that Irish men attending a Brooks concert wouldn’t take a chance on wearing a more typical brown or black cowboy hat lest someone might think they were wearing it in all seriousness and nickname them “JR” or “Sue Ellen” for the rest of their lives. Hence, the men would simply be swept up in the ceremony of the occasion and don a pink hat for the night, the only time in their lives they could get away with it without being slagged. A sad indictment of Ireland’s inability to let anyone away with anything.

And so, the scene was set. The pink cowboy hat was ready to make the leap from the relative obscurity of Athlone hen parties into the Brooks audience mainstream. Then, when the 2014 concerts were shut down, the hats were left in limbo. Thousands of them would have been left gathering dust to survive an apocalypse alongside the cockroaches. But the merch sellers had other ideas. The hats started showing up alongside knock-off T-shirts and flammable scarves outside concert venues, no matter the genre or audience profile.

[ Garth Brooks is back. And he has snubbed Dublin. It’s a win for the Real People of IrelandOpens in new window ]

Any reveller with a spring in their step or a few drinks on board was vulnerable to the draw of the hat, which offered an affordable and disposable costume for the night. Herd mentality also drove sales. Nobody wants to be the only dope without a hat in the photo for Instagram. And without the hat, how would anyone on the journey home know that you’d been to see Girls Aloud, or The Weeknd, or Coldplay?

When Brooks last played in Ireland in 2022, satirical website Waterford Whispers ran a headline which read, “Lad Selling Pink Cowboy Hats Outside Croke Park Set To Become Ireland’s Richest Man”. They joked then, but I’ve just priced 24 hats on Temu for less than 40 quid, so just imagine how little I’d be paying per unit if I scaled up to, say, 10,000 hats and then sold them next year at a tenner a pop outside the five Brooks concert venues. If I turn up in my own private jet you’ll know I’m sitting on cowboy hat money. And the next time a pink Stetson blocks your view of a stage, blame Garth Brooks.