My Hats

  (and several others)

 

     Hats can define a person’s role.  A crown is the sign of a king; a toque means a chef, a mortarboard a graduate; a montera a bullfighter; a kippah a Jew; while a pointy hat might be either a dunce or a wizard.  Many hats suggest nationality: woolen baglike barretinas indicate a Catalan, a skotthúfa or tail-cap an Icelander, and the tall, semi-transparent gat made of horsehair and bamboo a Korean.  Some suggest narratives.  At once time observers of the Soviet government noticed that Politburo members were more likely than others to appear in public ceremonies wearing the fur hat or karakul.  American publicity  about this trend created a small vogue for such hats among American business executives. 

     The so-called whoopee cap has a more complex history.  Once boys would often remodel men’s discarded felt hats by cutting the brims in a zig-zag pattern and turning them up, often then adding a personal choice of ornaments such as pins, political or advertising buttons, or bottle caps.   Classic whoopees are worn by several of the Dead End Kids in films of the ‘thirties.  Long past the time that boys really refashioned their elders’ outworn hats, the whoopee cap lived on, particularly in cartoons.  In Little Lulu, the boys are differentiated through hat style.  Tubby generally appears in a little white “Dixie Cup” sailor cap, while Willy is in a flat cloth cap, and Eddie wears a whoopee cap.  

     Surely the longest run for a whoopee wearer, though, is Archie’s friend Jughead who has worn such a cap since his first appearance in Pep Comics #22 in 1941.  The cap became yet more appropriate for Jughead’s character when it became obsolete even for children, implying that Jughead was a non-conformist willing to flout expected teen fashion standards.

     Something of a Jughead myself, I suppose, as a bookish preadolescent I realized I was incapable of being stylish and reacted by embracing a look of yesteryear.  I favored pocket watches and fancied vests instead of polos.  For sleeping I asked my parents for a nightshirt, but I never could abide the tasseled cap that came along.  While very likely necessary in the days before adequate heating, I did not find it  comfortable. 

     Though today relatively few men wear hats, even in inclement weather, three quarters of a century ago hats were a flourishing industry.  Separate shops were devoted to women’s and to men’s hats.  My father and every other executive suburbanite in my neighborhood took the train to the city in a white shirt under a brimmed hat, usually a fedora.   Made of felt, these required periodic cleaning and blocking, sometimes provided by shops in the lobbies of business towers, next door to the barber who could provide a weekly trim.   With many subtle variations of style, such hats allowed those in the know as good an estimator of personal wealth as the model of a man’s car.  Yet this high point of refinement was also the beginning of a rapid decline.  Most members if my generation have never worn such a hat.  Even in a Chicago winter most commuters these days go altogether hatless.

     As a teenager I conceived the tastes in headwear I still maintain, though whether my persistence implies sound early discernment, a decay of imagination, or simply inertia I cannot tell.  I am fondest I think of soft tweed caps with a snap visor, a top button, and eight cloth panels, sometimes called a newsboy cap, though I don’t care for that name.  The look is, I fancy, entirely different from the narrower and stiffer cap which lacks the top button, known in the ‘fifties as “ivy-league style” which sometimes had a small belt in the back to match the back-belted trousers of the day.  

     My weakness for an old-fashioned look in general may be the seedbed from which this taste grew, but it surely strengthened when I saw photographs of Jack Kerouac in similar caps.  Like Whitman’s open collared shirts the style signaled an identification with the working class.  I like the way they are made of suit-like fabrics like tweed, yet comport well with jeans.  They have enough semiotic imprecision to be suggestive rather than directive.

     The same cannot be said for berets, which I have worn since undergraduate days.  As unambiguous in its signification as a Sioux war bonnet, the beret in America is primarily associated with artists and intellectuals.  Its appeal arose as a result of its connotations of Continental sophistication enhanced by a particular association, centuries-old, with art.  Self-portraits by Rembrandt, Monet, Cézanne, and Rousseau lie behind cartoon portrayals of beret-wearing painters.  Through the examples of leading jazz musicians including Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, and Gene Krupa, the beret came to signify expertise in the hipper modern arts as well. 

     During World War II berets were among the articles which those who wished to join the Resistance were asked to bring, and the exploits of these courageous underground fighters added to the headwear’s positive image.  Berets in France were common enough at that time to attract no attention while uncommon enough to help to distinguish partisan fighters.  There is indeed an entirely military strain of beret history in which they are worn as part of the uniform of a good many nations.  In the U. S. Army berets were made standard wear army-wide in 2001.

     The Army was on my mind when I bought my first beret, but it was obvious to any observer that I was more likely a draft resister than an admirer of the Green Berets.  In the late ‘sixties people would mock the rebellious youth, saying, “They claim to be non-conformists, but they all dress alike.”  But of course, to wear clothing with no “meaning” would be as pointless as speaking gibberish.  (It is also all but  impossible, since the mind will strive to make sense of whatever it encounters.)  Furthermore, as I recall, the crowd up and down Haight Street in 1967 exhibited what could only be called an embarrassment of riches when it came to costume choices.  Still, the old Beat ensemble of shades, beret, turtleneck, and sandals was sufficiently persistent to render anyone displaying all these signifiers at once already passé as well as overdetermined in an unseemly way.

     At a distant third in my own portfolio of hats is the Panama straw hat.  With connections to the headwear of tropical farmworkers, this hat has a lineage altogether different from the straw boaters with a flat crown and brim worn in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  These were once so popular in America that many areas recognized a “straw hat day” when men shifted from felt to straw in the springtime, usually in May to be followed by “felt hat day” in September.  Young men began to amuse themselves by knocking the hats off anyone still wearing straw after the deadline.  The jokers sometimes assaulted their victims, particularly if they encountered resistance.  A 1910 editorial in The Pittsburg Press denounces such hooliganism, blaming it on Theodore Roosevelt’s “anarchistic” principles.

     The most extreme example of such behavior is the so-called “Straw Hat Riots” of 1922 New York City.  On the floor of the stock exchange, horseplay had developed in which brokers would intentionally wear hats past the deadline knowing that their hats would be grabbed and smashed by others, all in good fun.   Then more rowdy young men in the street, some carrying sticks with attached hooks, began to snag the hats of strangers.  In 1922 a group of youths in Lower Manhattan began such pranks a few days early on September 13, precipitating brawls that led to the blockage of the Manhattan Bridge and the intervention of police.  On September 16 the New York Times ran an excited headline: “CITY HAS WILD NIGHT OF STRAW HAT RIOTS; Gangs of Young Hoodlums With Spiked Sticks Terrorize Whole Blocks. VICTIMS RUN THE GAUNTLET Youths Line Car Tracks and Snatch -- Mob of 1,000 Dispersed on Amsterdam Avenue.”  Then followed eight days of disorders.

     Boaters have now disappeared for everyone except students at Harrow and Uppingham, but Panama hats continue to enjoy wide popularity.  Introduced in Europe at the 1855 Paris Exposition Universelle, they impressed Frenchman with their fine texture and were described in the catalogue as “straw cloth.”  When the United States assumed the Panama Canal project, more of the hats reached this country. 

     While everyone knows Van Gogh’s self-portraits wearing straw hats, many other artists wore the same style, but in this case the arty associations carry little weight.  The straw hat in my wardrobe is, like its Central American ancestors, meant to keep the sun  off.  It occupies a closet shelf next to another which has been demoted to service during lawn work.  Both are descendants of a hat I bought one once in Mérida in the Yucatán.  Patricia and I had just had lunch at a little Lebanese restaurant where I , with reckless abandon, had ordered kibbeh nayeh, which is to say, raw lamb.  We found our way then to a tiny hat shop, just past the row of sellers of hammocks, in a strip with a good many apparently identical competitors, each offering, it seemed, every style.   In addition, the vendedor de sombreros was capable, with a bit of water and some expert reshaping, of altering and customizing the form.  From this hat-master I obtained my first straw hat, and it served until it developed a prominent and growing hole at the very front of the crown, and I was obliged to locate its successor.    

     Though the cloth cap, beret, and Panama hat have been my lifelong mainstays, I am not averse to other possibilities.  Indoors as well as out, I am fond of a knit skullcap I bought from a vendor in the Jma el Fna of Marrakech.  When I put it on, I feel fresh regret for having bargained hard and succeeded in  paying the man a few dimes less than he was asking.  Partial to boots, I never wore a cowboy hat until I came upon a straw version in a Salvation Army store.  Recalling accounts of Charles Olson, a man of daunting presence already who often augmented his height with prominent Western-style hats, I bought it. 

     I have a brimmed rigid canvas hat specifically for wearing on rainy days while traveling, but it is so ugly In have worn it only a few times.  Next time I pass by the Salvation Army I shall donate it.  Its place has been taken by a bucket hat which is not quite so hard to look at and which can be jammed into a pocket or the bottom corner of a backpack.  While style always carries meaning, and clothing may be read like a code, it is sometimes trumped by function. 

     Some, though, damn practicality, give rein to the imagination, and make clothing a primary art form.  Beau Brummel proudly maintained that he took five hours a day to dress and washed his boots in champagne (a refinement more effective in the telling than in the doing) before he was cast into debtor’s prison and. ended his days in an asylum.  The Dadaist Elsa Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven went about hung with spoons and materials found in the street, wearing a tomato-can bra and a bird cage on her shaved and shellacked head.  Her clothing, though wild, made far more sense than her verse.  The Shaivite saddhus and Digambara or “sky-clad” Jains make their statement by wearing nothing at all.

     Were an archaeologist of the future to come upon my hats, they would tell a less dramatic story.  The portrait they imply is surely incomplete, even misleading, but this is what allows them to indicate aspirations and vanities, even blind spots, and to be thus at least as revealing as straight facts.  The old hats moldering in the closet shelf may take pride in the fact that they lie, and tell the truth, occasionally an extraordinary truth, in their humbler way but akin all the same to the magnificent machinations of art.  As with any cultural artifact, once one begins accounting for themes, beauty, context, influences, and sources, there is no end; interpretation may proceed at liberty and halt whenever the investigator is no longer amused.