Hats Are Back!

Hats are back! Well, they might be if you can believe the Ask Teri column in yesterday's Wall Street Journal:

Brimmed hats -- made of felt in the fall, straw in the summer -- are a jaunty flourish that appeals to guys with a confident, individual sense of style. Worth & Worth, the venerable Manhattan shop that has specialized in fedoras and top hats since 1922 and is now online (www.hatshop.com), says that a new generation is taking an interest in fedoras. For years, its core fedora fans had been conservative executives, lawyers and bankers between 40 and 60 years old.

"In the last year and a half, we are getting more guys in their 20s and 30s who are buying fedoras for the first time," says Orlando Palacio, hat designer and one of the owners of Worth & Worth. "They come in and don't have any idea what their hat size is." ("Wearing a Fedora Hat", January 10, 2008, p. D8)

The columnist attributes the trend in part to celebrities like Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt, who have taken to wearing narrow-brimmed fedoras (called stingy brims or just stingies). Aside from the celebrity endorsements, it actually makes sense. Brimmed hats keep the head warm in cold weather and the face, ears, and neck protected from the sun. In other words, they're functional in ways that baseball caps are not. Of course, fashion is fickle; and brimmed hats are both more expensive and more difficult to store than caps. Even if the weren't almost assuredly on the tail end of every fashion trend, I would suspect that Messrs. Depp and Pitt will soon move on to something else and take their legion imitators with them. Oh, well. The very idea that I would like something that approaches fashionability is ludicrous, anyway. In any event, the mention of brimmed hats in the Journal inspired me to order a new one from Art Fawcett, this one a fedora in midnight blue beaver felt with a C-crown and a 2 3/4" brim. (Art calls the hat above the Savoy; it's also made from midnight blue felt, but the crown and brim are different.) It should be ready next month, and I fully expect women to flock to me like they do to Brad Pitt when I take delivery.

Porkpie

You may recall my writing in late October that I had placed an order for a bespoke hat with Art Fawcett of Vintage Silhouettes in Butte Falls, Oregon. Well, it showed up to my doorstep this evening, and it is something else. What I ultimately decided on was a porkpie hat conceptually similar to the one shown in the picture above of Will from A Suitable Wardrobe. It may be a bit difficult to see, but a porkpie hat has an oval-shaped crown (ie, not a dent and not a teardrop-shaped raised area) and lacks dents on the side of the front. It's a marginally more casual hat than, say, a fedora, and most commercially-available porkpies are made even more casual by their shallow crowns and their narrow brims. But Will's porkpie isn't shallow of crown or narrow of brim, and mine is even less so. The crown when open is five and a half inches and creased at four inches. The brim is two and seven eighths inches wide. Art told me that the ribbon is 24 ligne, but I think he must have mispoken. Twenty-four ligne is pretty wide, and my ribbon isn't. It's charcoal in color, to match the four-ounce charcoal beaver fur felt of the hat body, and it has a stripe of burgundy in the center of the bow -- the addition of colored stripes in hat ribbons is one of Art's signatures.

The first thing I noticed about the hat was the pliability and softness of the felt. I have a felt cowboy hat and a felt off-the-rack Stetson fedora, and both of those are stiff as boards. This one isn't. Touching it is actually a sensual experience. The brim came snapped up, but it is simple to snap it down (as I prefer it). The crown is tall, and that makes the hat stand out, despite the muted color of the body and the band. Art has done a wonderful job, and I can't wait to get another hat from him. A navy fedora, perhaps?

A Good Hat

The story is that John F. Kennedy killed the hat. If you ever watch old movies, you will notice that all of the men always wear hats while outside. It isn't just movie fiction: through the 1950s, most men would have felt partially dressed if they ventured outdoors wearing a suit but no hat. Kennedy didn't like hats -- hats would have covered up his world-class hair, after all -- and he didn't wear them. At his inauguration, he wore a morning suit and carried top hat; but he didn't wear it, even though it was one of the coldest Inauguration Days on record. Supposedly, Kennedy dislike of the hat caused hat sales to plummet as American men imitated him, just as sales of undershirts supposedly plummeted after Clark Gable appeared without on in It Happened One Night in 1934. I suppose that it's possible that the story is true, at least to some extent, but it strikes me as being a little too, well, Just-So-like. I suspect that men's hats would have fallen on hard times in the '60s and '70s even without Kennedy's antipathy.

This is unfortunate, at least as far as I'm concerned. Baseball caps -- one of the few culturally-approved kinds of headwear nowadays -- are fine, at least if you're playing baseball or golf or something like that. In any other context, they look juvenile, inappropriate, and stupid. More than that, they really don't do what I need hats to do. I'm fair enough that merely thinking about the sun gives me a sunburn, and I'm folically-challenged. (And believe me, a sunburn on the top of one's head is not the most pleasant thing in the world.) I need a hat that will shade by head, face, and neck and one that will keep my head warm when it's cold outside. Baseball caps can't do these things. And so I decided to get a real hat.

Upon recommendations from Will from A Suitable Wardrobe (whose hat is pictured above) and others, I gave Art Fawcett of Vintage Silhouettes a call. By reputation, Art is one of the two best hatters in the United States (Graham Thompson of Optimo Fine Hats is the other). He's based in Butte Falls, Oregon and is a former master mason who developed a love for fedoras and decided to do a career change. It's clear from talking with him on the phone that hats are his passion. I decided to give him a try and PayPaled him a deposit. He in turn sent me a hat conformer, a contraption that allows a hatter to get the shape and size of a client's head. In the olden days, these things looked like top hats made out of round bar, but the modern one that he sent me is a clear plastic disc with tabs secured by wingnuts around the edge. An elastic band runs around the edge of the tabs. You put your head through the disc, which pushes the tabs into the shape of your head, then secure them in place by wingnuts. I have done this and will send it back to Art today. Right now, I'm thinking of a porkpie in charcoal beaver felt with a low-contrast ribbon. I'm not sure about whether I want the brim edge to be bound or not, but I don't think that I have to make that decision now. The hat should be ready by Christmas.