Collection: Newsboy Caps

A newsboy cap has a full, rounded crown sewn from separate panels, usually eight, with a button at the top, while a traditional flat cap is cut from fewer pieces and lies flat against the head. Both sit on a short stiff brim. On the newsboy the crown is often buttoned down to that brim, and some flat caps do the same, which is why the two get mixed up.

The practical difference is volume. The newsboy sits higher and looks slouchier; the flat cap reads sleeker and disappears more. If you want volume, take the newsboy; if you want a low profile, take the flat cap. Ours have their own low-profile collection, and the construction compared side by side is in our article.

In everyday use they are broadly the same cap: cabbie hat, paperboy hat, newsie cap, pageboy cap and Gatsby cap all describe a paneled cap with a rounded crown. The names come from who wore it or from where the word caught on, not from a different pattern. Newsie and paperboy point back to the boys who sold papers in American cities, cabbie to the drivers who wore it, and Gatsby to the 1974 film that revived the 1920s look.

Three names need reading more carefully. Baker boy usually signals the wider, slouchier version, and scally cap is used in New England and in Irish-American usage for a flat cap at least as often as for a newsboy. Cabbie carries a trace of the same double meaning in British usage. Ghelter lists all of them under newsboy caps, and if a listing gives you only a name, our breakdown of how the cap is built shows what to look for.

It fits from the band, not from the crown. The cap should sit snug around the widest part of your head without pressing a line into your forehead, low enough that it stays on when you turn your head, with the brim resting just above your eyebrows. The crown is soft and full by design, so extra room up top is the style working, not the cap being too big.

To find your size, run a soft tape measure around the widest part of your head, just above the ears and across the middle of the forehead, and keep the tape level. Measure twice and use the larger number. Ghelter lists every newsboy cap by head measurement in centimeters, with 55-60 cm and 56-58 cm the most common spans, and about half the range is sold as an adjustable or elastic fit rather than a fixed size. If you need the wider end, our guide to caps for bigger heads covers it.

Treat it as the one structured piece in the outfit and keep everything else plain. A wool or herringbone cap over a crew neck, an overshirt or a wool coat is the version that reads current rather than costume, and it works because the cap supplies the texture and nothing else competes with it. In summer the same rule holds with cotton or linen over a plain tee. There are outfit-by-outfit ideas in our style guide.

The two things that date the look are matching the cap to the rest of the outfit in the same fabric, and wearing it pushed too far back. Sit it level and let it be the only patterned thing you have on. We go through the mistakes that date it separately.

Wool and herringbone for cold weather, cotton and linen for summer, corduroy and denim for everyday wear, and genuine or vegan leather for a harder-wearing look. Herringbone is a woven twill pattern rather than a fiber, almost always in wool, which is why it behaves like wool and looks like a pattern. With leather, check which kind you are buying, because Ghelter's newsboy cap collection carries genuine leather alongside vegan leather; the material is listed on every product page, and the animal hide ones sit in our genuine leather caps collection.

On washing, the honest answer is that a newsboy cap is a structured garment and almost never belongs in a washing machine, which softens the panels and warps the brim. Spot clean instead: a soft brush for wool and herringbone, a barely damp cloth with mild soap for cotton, corduroy and denim, a dedicated conditioner for genuine leather, and a damp cloth only for vegan leather, because oil-based conditioners strip its coating. Reshape the cap while it is still damp, and let it air dry away from radiators and direct sun. Check the material listed on the product page before you clean anything.