Last September, I was served an Instagram ad — sigh — for a small, independent Bay Area brand called Article Samples. The focal point of their lookbook, rendered in austere film photography and urban jungle backdrops, was a trucker hat.
As a fashion item, the humble trucker hat has experienced a bit of a renaissance in recent years as part of a renewed interest in Y2K fashion — low-rise jeans, dresses with jeans, Von Dutch and Juicy Couture and Uggs. You probably know the drill.
Here’s the thing, though: It’s not just any ol’ trucker hat. What is written on the cap feels instantly vital, a phrase that feels like you’ve heard it in passing a million times — or at least any time you’ve walked past a car with shattered glass surrounding it. Printed on the cap in big blocky text is a sentence that has ping-ponged in my brain for months now:
“Someone bipped my car and stole my heart in San Francisco.”
It’s a perfect turn of phrase, the sort of thing that will make you laugh the first time you hear it — and then proceed to think about for time immemorial. The San Francisco of it all is clear, riffing off Tony Bennett’s legendary ode to the city with perhaps the most ubiquitous piece of slang to emerge in the Bay Area’s lingua franca in recent memory: Bipping.
Like so many brilliant ideas, the phrase started off as a gag. Article Samples co-founder David Harris, 27, was spitballing ideas on Zoom with his business partner and college friend, Tim Wu, 24, for a trucker hat.
“I was just saying it as a joke, you know, and then [Tim] laughed and was like, ‘Wait, why does that sound kind of good?’” he told me one March afternoon over coffee near City Hall.
Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that, a month before we met, a car got bipped at that very intersection, according to a San Francisco Chronicle database of car break-ins reported to San Francisco police.
They wanted to make something inspired by the absurd, occasionally off-color novelty caps that are a fixture at flea markets, thrift stores, and eBay shops. For those who don’t spend their days trolling eBay for vintage “grails,” the best trucker hats are a bit harmlessly dirtbag-y, the sort of thing you’d wear for the irony and then … just wear forever. Look at this red cap with dotted white splatters and the text “Damn gulls” emblazoned in all-caps. It rules.
And they succeeded. The hat immediately struck a nerve with anyone who saw it. Harris wore an early iteration out in downtown before it went on sale, he said, and almost instantly started getting stopped on the street. People stopped him to take photos of the hat. Even workers at the streetwear store Supreme’s downtown location inquired about where he got the hat — a full circle moment for someone whose gateway to streetwear, like many other Zillennial kids, was Supreme and the Odd Future collective.
The “Bipped hat,” as it’s advertised, sold out within weeks. About 90% of them, Harris estimates, were sold within the greater Bay Area.
It remains sold out on the Article Samples website, likely by necessity. Both Harris and Wu work day jobs; Harris works at the Nike flagship in San Francisco’s Union Square, while Wu works in finance out in Phoenix. As a result, only 200 of the hats exist out in the wild, Wu told Gazetteer SF. And while there are plans to release more of the hats, it probably won’t come until the middle of the year — it remains a three-person operation, after all — making the hat feel a bit like a cult classic.
Naturally, my conversations with the two of them gravitated toward the topic of bipping. The unspoken part, of course, is what bipping represents in matters of San Francisco’s public safety. Wu, who was born and raised in San Francisco, said that the feeling of un-safety is as bad as it’s been, noting that his family feels a renewed anxiety living in the city.
“It's just been out of control,” Wu said. “It just sucks seeing that. Obviously, it has an effect on us, just me being from there and David working there, living there.”
It’s a phenomenon that San Francisco has become notorious for, Harris acknowledged, pointing to local news coverage and divisive YouTuber-documentarian Andrew Callaghan putting a shine on “bipping.” (Police data from the first quarter of 2024 shows a marked decline in car break-ins. Still, there’s a reason the “bip city” moniker persists.)
But Harris expressed a bit more sympathy.
“They're trying to survive in whatever ways that they might know themselves, right?” he said, before adding, “Trust me. If I got bipped, I would hate it.”
It’s clear that the hat isn’t that deep; the conversations I had with both founders didn’t linger much on San Francisco’s various troubles. I also got the sense that neither of them want Article Samples to be defined by the hat alone. So, for posterity’s sake, among the other cool things in the Article Samples catalog: A patchwork button-down very much indebted to Junya Watanabe and Comme des Garcons and a very neat abstract-print sweater with big, billowing sleeves that is nearing release.
But like so much great fashion, the hat taps into something bigger than itself. So much of the hand-wringing about the state of the city presupposes that the historic majesty of the city — the sort of thing that Bennett waxed romantic about, and other songwriters have tried and failed to capture — can’t exist with all of the current woes of San Francisco. Certainly, the history of San Francisco and, really, every other major American city, has shown that to not be the case. The Summer of Love ended with a brutal murder; the gay liberation movement coincided with the Symbionese Liberation Army. Whatever rose-hued glasses we apply when we look back on today will likely elide all of the anxieties we feel at this present moment.
So even if they just set out to make a funny trucker hat, a hat can’t just be a hat when it feels like it captures San Francisco, in all its past glory and current ill, in one clever line.
