The Hat

A piece of history

The victor in a duel between stags will often sport an assortment of foliage around its antlers. And when a man wants to assert his power, declare social or economic success, or claim tribal or political loyalty, he puts something on his head. It might be a metre-high display of feathers, a jewelled triple crown, a tall black stovepipe hat or a red baseball cap, though it need not be dramatic to be effective. In The President’s Hat, the prize-winning novel by Antoine Laurain, President Mitterand’s fedora, forgotten in a Paris brasserie, enters and disturbs four lives. Hats have an aura possessed by no other item of dress. Reflecting on this mysterious power, milliner Stephen Jones concludes that hats lead autonomous lives – so there are risks.

Because men’s hats were about status and respect, rules about which hat, and when and how to wear one, have long been important. If you wear the wrong thing, “you will probably do the wrong thing,” says a 19th-century etiquette guide, “and be the wrong thing”. In medieval Europe the significance of the hat was well understood. In wool, felt or straw, headgear signalled status through quality, size or ornament. Lower down the social scale, but still markers of respect, plain wool felts and coarse straws were everyday protective workwear. Women, having less public presence, were required for reasons of modesty and religious custom simply to cover their hair – their ‘crowning glory’.
 

In Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait (1434), Giovanni Arnolfini wears a large black fine straw hat, his wife an elaborate linen headdress. It is a magnificent painting but why feature this hat that overwhelms the subject’s small pale face? Giovanni Arnolfini was a merchant from Tuscany, the source of Europe’s premium straw, and had had a profitable year selling luxury goods in Flanders. His hat is therefore ‘product placement’. However, this was not the period’s typical cap or chaperon: its construction – moulded, brimmed and symmetrical – is wholly modern. Like the couple’s furred robes and fine furnishings, it signals social and economic success. Her headgear, on the other hand, conforms to another code: the white frills framing her face not only lend her a demure sweetness but are probably arranged in the latest style. A woman’s headgear thus reflected her beauty, modesty and taste.
 

Although Tuscan straws were desirable, it was the beaver felt that became the high status ‘must-have’ hat across Europe. The felting process was arduous. Consequently, good hats were expensive: in 1661 the English diarist Samuel Pepys paid today’s equivalent of £284 for his. Women habitually ‘borrowed’ men’s hats for hunting, but as Queen Henrietta Maria (wife of King Charles I) realised, feathery hats flatter, and ‘cavalier’ styles soon became fashionable female wear. The 17th century was the heyday of fine felts: trimmed with feathers, braid or jewels, the cavalier hat was worn by royalty from on down, and by 1700 European beavers had been hunted to extinction.
 

Today’s hat as an item of fashion – a work of artistic and technical skill – is often credited as the creation of Marie Antoinette’s ‘modiste’ (milliner) Rose Bertin. “A woman’s hat, to be successful, must be noticeable,” said 1920s hatter Fred Willis, and few hats could have been more noticeable than Bertin’s ‘Triumph of Liberty’ of 1780, where a fully rigged ship sails across a towering coiffure. But when revolution was in the air, male and female headgear had to sober up. Bertin persuaded Marie Antoinette into wearing simple straw ‘bergère’ (shepherdess) hats in milkmaid style, although it was too late to save her from the guillotine.
 

Fixing the brim to the cavalier’s crown at three points created the 18th century’s modest braided tricorne hat. But at the end of the 18th century in France, any ornament was risky. Fixed at two points to the crown, the severe bicorne – favoured by Napoleon – replaced tricornes, and plain round felts, in democratic British country style, became modish too. However, the arrival of the top hat in the 1790s deposed cocked hats, and when silk replaced fur as fabric, toppers boomed, saving beavers from total extinction.

For women, the neo-classical fashions of 1800 demanded neat little capped heads. Straw bergère hats, pulled down and tied under the chin with ribbon, became bonnets. Simplicity was short-lived, however. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, as shiny top hats – or ‘stovepipes’ – soared upwards, bonnets expanded in all directions, exuberantly ornamented. Milliners became celebrities and had to be French. By 1840, however, submitting to a growing conservatism, bonnets came to signal meekness and modesty: shedding ornament, brims drooped and lengthened, hiding the face. These joyless objects were gradually relegated to the elderly and to nurses; hats, on the other hand, initially considered ‘fast’, blossomed. The ‘three-storeys-and-a-basement’ hat, piled high with flora and fauna, and the ostrich-plumed ‘Merry Widow’ hat, which negotiated doorways with difficulty, were just two of the more outré creations of a Gilded Age millinery boom.
  

Changing every season, women’s hats prospered in a cascade of new styles, but only the 1920s cloche has really left a lasting impression. By contrast, the top hat and bowler dominated 19th- and 20th-century male styles. Even now, when neither hat is part of everyday life, their codes are understood. Toppers are ‘posh’ and powerful, though 20th-century stage and film added a jaunty song-and-dance side – and on Marlene Dietrich they crossed gender boundaries. The bowler, originating in Britain around 1850 to protect gamekeepers, moved upwards into the increasingly powerful world of finance – not ‘posh’, but hard-headed. Like the topper, however, its role as comic accessory in the films of Chaplin or Laurel and Hardy, if undermining its role as status symbol, also immortalised it.
 

In the mid-20th century calamitous decline of hat wearing – a consequence of radical socio-economic and demographic change – the entertainment industry came to the rescue. The businessman’s unexciting trilby on Humphrey Bogart or Frank Sinatra looked dashing, even dangerous. Harrison Ford and more recently Pharrell Williams have popularised the fedora. Greta Garbo and later Lady Gaga gave both styles sex appeal, and now if a woman buys a hat, it will often be one of these.

Hats will always be worn for practical reasons, but the couture hat did not return to the high street. If it is no longer an everyday object, the fashion hat is now newsworthy and milliners can be celebrities. Freed from constraints of tradition or etiquette, it is a showpiece of technical invention and imaginative power. Today’s generation, unlike the last, has no fear of hats, no sense that they are compulsory and old-fashioned. Like the stag’s foliage crown, they are pleasurable, celebratory and meant to be noticed. Invincible, hats find ways to survive. Napoleon finally didn’t win, but in one way he is still a winner. In November 2023 his bicorne sold for nearly two million euros. Immortalised, his power lives on in a hat.