In the hat of the moment

The hat was once as essential for leaving the house as a pair of trousers, but the sight of a dapper gent sporting one is now all too rare

- John F. Mueller

When my late grandmother was a girl, she was most impressed by the only commuter in the village because of the hats he wore. She was used to seeing men wearing tweed caps or going to Newmarket or to church in a trilby (interesting that the races and God warranted the same hat). However, the gentleman she remembered especially had an additional set of headwear that was necessary to go ‘up to’ London: a stiff and very formal black hat, possibly a Homburg or a bowler.

Until relatively recently, it was unthinkable to see anyone outdoors without a hat and your choice of headgear said as much about you as a person as it did about what you were getting up to. Hats—for both men and women—are primarily mundane and practical. They protect your head from rain, sunburn and dirt. In an age of Friday-only baths, they also protected the onlooker from seeing your greasy curls. National stereotypes are positively riddled with hats: as much as the broad-brimmed cowboy Stetson says ‘American’ and a sombrero indicates a Mexican, the bowler hat remains, to this day, the symbol of the British male.

One could argue that men’s fashion has been permanently impoverished since we stopped wearing hats on a regular basis. Worse still, it has left us naked in public. In the Middle Ages, there were laws that required the wearing of hats and, over the ensuing centuries, British innovation and sense of style gave the world some of its most iconic examples. This then, as a 1940s advert stated, is a rallying cry to all you chaps (and ladies) out there: ‘If you want to get ahead, get a hat!’