Trend Forecasting: IKEA Bucket Hats

The bucket hat has long been a staple of seemingly every rapper and rapper-adjacent hypebeast's chapeau wardrobe, so much so that there's even a Change.org petition to get Tyler, the Creator to manufacture them as a Golf Wang product. ("whoa we gotta make this happen right now like can you imagine it would be so cool and it would match the shorts and shoes," writes the petitioner, and I can't help but agree.)

Me sagan left brain n juan Take credit for bucket hats — thebe kgositsile (@earlxsweat) June 4, 2012

Given the storied history of the bucket hat in the rap/fashion milieus over the past decade, it's surprising to think that the humble head-topper could be the sleeper hit of Summer2k19woohoo, but I'm here to tell you that that's exactly what's going on. The secret ingredient that's snuck its way into the bucket hat main course, though? IKEA, naturally.

IKEA nudged its way into the fashun-verse with a Virgil Abloh collaboration last year, titled MARKERAD, which means “marked” in Swedish and didn't get an official U.S. release until 2019. In fairness to the Swedish brand, it's been quietly crypto-cool ever since its inception in 1942, but Abloh's seal of approval officially elevated IKEA into the hype stratosphere.

That hypeness has, naturally, translated itself into hatness of late, with IKEA offering a $3.99 bucket hat made from its signature blue bags. The hat quickly sold out online, leading to a surge in pricing on resale sites from depop to Poshmark; as a committed headwear futures analyst, I would advise you to click "purchase" on this trend now, before prices skyrocket even further and the IKEA-bucket-hat bubble bursts.

This is the part of the story where I out myself as an IKEA bucket hat owner; a friend in the process of moving apartments brought me the hat as a hostess gift at my last dinner party, where I wore it with overalls while shelling sugar snap peas and looked, as another friend put it, "like an unaccompanied minor and also, somehow, a survivalist grandpa." Chic!

The moment I placed the IKEA bucket hat atop my sweaty, mid-food-prep head, I could feel it. Here, fully formed and brought to my door along with some cold beer and a perplexing onion salad, was the next Polly Pocket locket, the next corn on the cob. IKEA is everyone's simultaneous dream and nightmare, a place to chow down on Swedish meatballs and soft-serve, to break up with partners and cry in the children's furniture aisle as you dream of a perfect family that is not to be; the brand's ability to contain multitudes, and to do it all in clean lines and at a reasonable price point, makes it infinitely collab-able.

Now we watch and wait for Jacquemus to top his next season's creations with IKEA bucket hats and send them down the runway; or, even better, maybe Schoolboy Q will cop one to wear at his next show. The clock starts now.