Starbucks has a dress code for its baristas, and its latest iteration permits the wearing of fedoras on the job.
What Starbucks calls a fedora is not a fedora.
A fedora is a felt hat with a lengthwise crease in the crown, which is pinched in the front on both sides, and a wide brim. The brim may be worn snapped down or snapped up. It takes its name from the play Fedora by Victorien Sardou, in which Sarah Bernhardt wore a wide-brimmed felt hat in the title role.
The hat that Starbucks thinks is a fedora, the hat with the distinctively narrow brim that has become the uniform of the hipster class, is a trilby. It takes its name from George du Maurier's novel Trilby, because such a hat was worn in the stage production. Those cheap narrow-brimmed hats heaped on the shelves at Target are trilbies.
Trilbies are more casual, more sporty than fedoras. I wear a fedora between Labor Day and Memorial Day. "Man, that is a serious hat," a gentleman once called out to me on the street. I have no objection to hipsters' preference for trilbies—it helps to identify them at a distance—but I do object to their arrogating to themselves the dignity of a fedora.