Interesting stuff as always. Here's a personal anecdote:

My father and his younger brother were accepted at Auburn University shortly before the outbreak of WW II in the US. They were raised on a small, red clay dirt farm in southern Alabama and no one in their immediate family had been to college before (you can see a representation of this kind of situation in Norman Rockwell's 1954 painting "Breaking Home Ties," in which the farmer father holds his son's hat in his hands as they wait for the train that will take the boy to college https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Home_Ties

).

So my father and uncle dressed up as they thought fit, including (what were probably to them some snazzy) hats. When they got to Auburn, none of the men were wearing hats, so they threw their haberdashery onto the nearest roof and began their college careers bare-headed.