What color is the Cat in the Hat's hat?

The Cat in the Hat wears a red-and-white-striped hat.

The hat is a tall top hat marked by alternating red and white bands, matching the Cat’s red bow tie and creating one of Dr. Seuss’s most recognizable character designs. In the story, the Cat arrives while Sally and her brother are home on a rainy day and tries to entertain them with increasingly chaotic tricks.

The Cat in the Hat was written and illustrated by Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, and published by Random House in 1957. Geisel designed it as an engaging early-reader book, using a limited vocabulary and lively illustrations instead of the dull primers common at the time.

The hat’s colors are sometimes recalled incorrectly because later stage and film productions may vary details of costume design. In the original book and the major adaptations, however, its defining pattern is red and white. The Cat’s companions, Thing One and Thing Two, add to the resulting household mayhem.