HAT TALK

"You can leave your hat on"
-Joe Cocker

Hats. Until a bare-headed young John F. Kennedy was sworn in as President of the United States in 1960, everyone wore hats in the US and Europe. It was just something a man did not leave the house without, part of your wardrobe. Poor, rich, young, old, you wore a hat. The primary purpose of a hat originally was to keep the sun and rain off your head and keep your head warm, but over time it became a fashion statement as well.

What sort of hat you wore helped define who you were, or at least how you saw yourself. Yet even that perception changed based on who wore a hat. Take the pork pie hat. It is a sort of fedora, with a smaller brim and made from a harder material. Pork pie hats can look silly, but on Coach Tom Landry it looked tough.

Or consider this contrast: Oliver Hardy wearing a bowler, making it look comical. Yet without the hat, he wouldn't be nearly as recognizable, and it contributed to a lot of the humorous stunts and poses he would get into as well.

And John Wickham Gascoyne Berresford Steed wearing a bowler, making it look dashing. Of course having Emma Peel hanging off your arm in tight leather never hurts either. Add in the ubiquitous umbrella and you've got an old fashioned English Gentleman.

The Driving Cap is a standard for a lot of people still: it's easy to care for, doesn't take up much space (try driving with top hat on), and still does the job of keeping your head dry and warm. Originally made popular by giving you something you could wear in your Model T, the driving cap has changed little over the years, with only slight modifications such as the version the Great Gatsby wore, or the leather version seen today.

And the cowboy hat. John Wayne became an icon by wearing these, and most men look more rugged and capable by merely putting one on. Few articles of clothing carry so much distinctive and broadly understood connotation: rugged, individual, strong, capable. Unless you wore one of those gigantic 10 gallon jobs or something with more spangles and feathers and decorations than Liberace's wardrobe.

Yet aside from a few isolated folks (such as real, honest cowboys, football players, and rappers) the hat has more or less disappeared from the head of the western male. Mustaches and beards were shunned for decades, but are starting a comeback, but while I would love to see it, hats are not so far. And it would be a much tougher hill to climb for hats to come back in style.

Shaving less often and trimming occasionally is easy enough to do, even if you don't wisely invest in a beard trimmer a pair of scissors will do. Hats are another story. You need places to store hats, you need to take care of them, and you need to clean them. Few businesses are around in most towns and even cities these days that can even clean a hat. If you wash a fedora without a hat mold and starch to get it back into shape it turns into Gilligan's shapeless sailor hat. If someone sits on your bowler, it is all but destroyed. The rage on a man's face when some comic sits on their top hat or knocks the crown out in some old movie is difficult for modern viewers to understand but those things were expensive and could not be repaired.

Still, I like hats, I used to wear a white fedora (that's where I learned about care and cleaning... oops), and I wear a baseball cap when its raining outside or very windy on the coast. Men run around without hat or umbrella today, rarely do you see one prepared for the weather. As was noted in the movie Big Trouble in Little China:

Wang Chi: A brave man likes the feel of nature on his face, Jack.
Egg Shen: Yeah, and a wise man has enough sense to get in out of the rain!

A hat would keep the rain off.

Yet there's another aspect to hats that is not considered much today. Think back to those old movies. Remember how everyone's hair was plastered down like a helmet? Slicked down with pomade, carefully shaped?

You can't have poofy "full" hair and wear a hat. If you do, the parts that are not covered are still all poofy, but the rest is mashed down to a nice hair helmet. That's why when big hair came into style in the 1960's, women were wearing these absurd minimalist hats, to still technically be wearing one, but have no impact on their gigantic, carefully coiffed hair. Some of them were the size of a fist.

So a lot of hair styles would have to change as well. Mind you the skin job or the buzz cut work great with any hat, and long hair always works with any hat because there's so much it tends not to be all that full on top to begin with. So for many guys, especially balding ones, a hat is a great choice. It just will take a lot of cultural shifts and "infrastructure" for the hat to really return as a fashion standard.

But I can always hope.