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| A model walks the runway wearing a hat during the Lanvin fashion show in Paris in January. At the recent men's wear shows in Paris and Milan, hats returned to the stage after declining over the last few decades |
There was a time when only beggars went bareheaded. This was some while ago, a century or so. But up until World War II and the period just after, a gentleman was not considered properly dressed without a hat. Even the names of hats were rich in character and historical association. The bowler, or derby, with the rigid shape of an upended bean pot, was named for a 19th-century English earl who popularized the style. The fedora's name came from a play of that title, written for Sarah Bernhardt by the otherwise largely forgotten French dramatist Victorien Sardou.
Then the hat went the way of the dodo. Social historians are divided about the cause of the sartorial die-off, although an often repeated canard attributes it to President Kennedy and his rarely covered thatch of luxuriant hair. The real blame probably belongs to automobiles, though. Hats were knocked off when you entered a car and inevitably got squashed beneath a passenger's wayward behind or went into orbit when you lowered the top to a convertible.
Whatever the reason, there is no arguing with the facts of the hat's decline. In 1940, there were 180 independent major manufacturers of hats operating in the United States. Today there are 10. And while it is true that the headwear business is not altogether on the skids (retail sales of hats in the U.S. are estimated at $1.75 billion annually, roughly 40 percent of that figure being hats sold to men), it would be stretching things to say the future looks bright.
Or it would have been before the recent menswear shows in Paris and Milan.
Who knows what happened in Europe? Was it that the stingy-brim trilby, so popular in Williamsburg that no Halloween hipster costume would be complete without one, made it safe for men to experiment again with broader brims? Was it the influence of a fine museum show sponsored by the Borsalino Foundation at the Triennale in Milan demonstrating cinema's long love affair with the hat? Or was it, as Don Rongione — the president of the Bollman Hat Co., a Pennsylvania manufacturer founded in 1868 — said, that hat-friendly entertainers like Justin Timberlake, Usher and Neo have helped acquaint a generation of consumers with the idea that hats might be cool?
Anyone who has seen Douglas Keeve's 1995 documentary "Unzipped" knows better than to second-guess the telepathy that causes designers to arrive at the same idea at the same time. In that film, about Isaac Mizrahi, there was an inexplicable run on inspirations derived from the 1922 silent film "Nanook of the North."
"The stigma of looking like your father, or even your grandfather, if you wear a hat is gone," Rongione said. "A young person doesn't relate to a hat that way anymore."
Designers must certainly think so because the runway shows in Europe looked as if everyone had visited the same hatters' convention. At the Armani and Emporio Armani shows, the designers favored slouchy berets were replaced with a modernized rendition of the trilby: duotone, high-crowned and often with a pert midsize brim. At Etro, the hats had crowns so high they lent the models a resemblance to Rastafarians or coneheads.
At Dsquared, a latent Sergio Leone theme was suggested by the designer twins Dean and Dan Caten's deployment of broad-brimmed Stetsons in requisite bad-guy black. At Dai Fujiwara's show for Issey Miyake, the cocked hats with their midsize brims were pure James Cagney ("Made it, Ma! Top of the world!"), while at Massimiliano Giornetti's show for Ferragamo the slouch-brimmed Borsalinos in muted jewel tones seemed like a loving, although perhaps unintentional, homage to George Raft.
"For sure, we can say that hats are having a fashion moment," said Elisa Fulco, the curator of the Borsalino Foundation. "But filmmakers have always understood the power of the hat," added Fulco, who, together with the film critic Gianni Canova, viewed more than 1,000 films to find the 400 clips on view at "Cinema Wears a Hat," a show at the Milan Triennale museum through late March.
"There are funny hats, magical hats, eccentric hats, erotic hats, hats that are disturbing," Fulco said. "Hats are different from other articles of clothing because they are so close to your face; they create a strange link between your appearance and your interiority. Each time you put on a hat, you create an entirely different story."
Having exhausted the usual narratives of power and gender as expressed through clothing, and wary of runway stunts unlikely to produce much cash register action, designers may have merely been casting about for new tools and communally fell upon the hat. How else to explain the use of hats by designers as unalike as Angela Missoni and Thom Browne?
To her show of subdued knits that looked a lot like pj's, Missoni added flowerpot hats with brims pulled so low over the models' faces that it wasn't obvious how they knew which way to walk. For Thom Browne's show, a single hat became the signifying design gesture: Flat-crowned, the color of ground nutmeg, the modified boater made from feathers was a testament to Browne's affection for the fast-disappearing skills of artisans everywhere, in this case of the feather craftsmen known as plumassiers.
At the Roberto Cavalli presentation, which owed a lot to Jim Morrison in the guise of the Lizard King, a literal crowning touch was provided by Borsalinos with brims as broad as pizzas. At Givenchy, Riccardo Tisci outfitted his models in caps with looping flaps above the ears that made it seem as if you could hoist one like a six-pack. At Yohji Yamamoto, models came out wearing the steep-crowned brimmed hats that the designer himself has favored for years.
There were stunt toppers, of course, and hats that looked as if they'd been yanked from the bottom of the costume trunk, most predictably those at Galliano, where the heavily rouged models wore cartwheel-shaped fur trapper caps and turbans reminiscent of Madame, the Wayland Flowers marionette.
But the best uses of hats in a season that is far from over — the men's shows in New York begin next week — came at the Paris shows of Dior Homme and Lanvin. While Kris Van Assche, the Dior Homme designer, favored handsome but austere flat-brimmed hats right out of "Witness," Lucas Ossendrijver, who designs men's clothes for Lanvin, seemed to have fallen in love with the way a broad-brimmed Borsalino with a suggestively pinched crown instantly sexualized an ordinary two-button suit.
"The theory used to be that in difficult economic times, when a man couldn't afford to buy an overcoat and a suit, he would pick up his wardrobe with a hat," Rongione said. That's not what's happening now. Some of the hats on European runways would look perfectly fine on an Average Joe. (OK, an Average Joe who happens to hang out at the Smile or in the lobby of the Ace Hotel.)
"A regular guy could actually pull off some of these hats," Rongione added. "As opposed to something no one in his right mind would wear out of the house."
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| A model walks the runway wearing a hat during the Yohji Yamamoto fashion show in Paris in January. |
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| A model walks down the runway during the John Varvados Milan Fashion Week Menswear A/W 2011 show on January 15, 2011 in Milan, Italy. |
Whatever the reason, there is no arguing with the facts of the hat's decline. In 1940, there were 180 independent major manufacturers of hats operating in the United States. Today there are 10. And while it is true that the headwear business is not altogether on the skids (retail sales of hats in the U.S. are estimated at $1.75 billion annually, roughly 40 percent of that figure being hats sold to men), it would be stretching things to say the future looks bright.
Or it would have been before the recent menswear shows in Paris and Milan.
Who knows what happened in Europe? Was it that the stingy-brim trilby, so popular in Williamsburg that no Halloween hipster costume would be complete without one, made it safe for men to experiment again with broader brims? Was it the influence of a fine museum show sponsored by the Borsalino Foundation at the Triennale in Milan demonstrating cinema's long love affair with the hat? Or was it, as Don Rongione — the president of the Bollman Hat Co., a Pennsylvania manufacturer founded in 1868 — said, that hat-friendly entertainers like Justin Timberlake, Usher and Neo have helped acquaint a generation of consumers with the idea that hats might be cool?
Anyone who has seen Douglas Keeve's 1995 documentary "Unzipped" knows better than to second-guess the telepathy that causes designers to arrive at the same idea at the same time. In that film, about Isaac Mizrahi, there was an inexplicable run on inspirations derived from the 1922 silent film "Nanook of the North."
"The stigma of looking like your father, or even your grandfather, if you wear a hat is gone," Rongione said. "A young person doesn't relate to a hat that way anymore."
Designers must certainly think so because the runway shows in Europe looked as if everyone had visited the same hatters' convention. At the Armani and Emporio Armani shows, the designers favored slouchy berets were replaced with a modernized rendition of the trilby: duotone, high-crowned and often with a pert midsize brim. At Etro, the hats had crowns so high they lent the models a resemblance to Rastafarians or coneheads.
At Dsquared, a latent Sergio Leone theme was suggested by the designer twins Dean and Dan Caten's deployment of broad-brimmed Stetsons in requisite bad-guy black. At Dai Fujiwara's show for Issey Miyake, the cocked hats with their midsize brims were pure James Cagney ("Made it, Ma! Top of the world!"), while at Massimiliano Giornetti's show for Ferragamo the slouch-brimmed Borsalinos in muted jewel tones seemed like a loving, although perhaps unintentional, homage to George Raft.
"For sure, we can say that hats are having a fashion moment," said Elisa Fulco, the curator of the Borsalino Foundation. "But filmmakers have always understood the power of the hat," added Fulco, who, together with the film critic Gianni Canova, viewed more than 1,000 films to find the 400 clips on view at "Cinema Wears a Hat," a show at the Milan Triennale museum through late March.
"There are funny hats, magical hats, eccentric hats, erotic hats, hats that are disturbing," Fulco said. "Hats are different from other articles of clothing because they are so close to your face; they create a strange link between your appearance and your interiority. Each time you put on a hat, you create an entirely different story."
Having exhausted the usual narratives of power and gender as expressed through clothing, and wary of runway stunts unlikely to produce much cash register action, designers may have merely been casting about for new tools and communally fell upon the hat. How else to explain the use of hats by designers as unalike as Angela Missoni and Thom Browne?
To her show of subdued knits that looked a lot like pj's, Missoni added flowerpot hats with brims pulled so low over the models' faces that it wasn't obvious how they knew which way to walk. For Thom Browne's show, a single hat became the signifying design gesture: Flat-crowned, the color of ground nutmeg, the modified boater made from feathers was a testament to Browne's affection for the fast-disappearing skills of artisans everywhere, in this case of the feather craftsmen known as plumassiers.
At the Roberto Cavalli presentation, which owed a lot to Jim Morrison in the guise of the Lizard King, a literal crowning touch was provided by Borsalinos with brims as broad as pizzas. At Givenchy, Riccardo Tisci outfitted his models in caps with looping flaps above the ears that made it seem as if you could hoist one like a six-pack. At Yohji Yamamoto, models came out wearing the steep-crowned brimmed hats that the designer himself has favored for years.
There were stunt toppers, of course, and hats that looked as if they'd been yanked from the bottom of the costume trunk, most predictably those at Galliano, where the heavily rouged models wore cartwheel-shaped fur trapper caps and turbans reminiscent of Madame, the Wayland Flowers marionette.
But the best uses of hats in a season that is far from over — the men's shows in New York begin next week — came at the Paris shows of Dior Homme and Lanvin. While Kris Van Assche, the Dior Homme designer, favored handsome but austere flat-brimmed hats right out of "Witness," Lucas Ossendrijver, who designs men's clothes for Lanvin, seemed to have fallen in love with the way a broad-brimmed Borsalino with a suggestively pinched crown instantly sexualized an ordinary two-button suit.
"The theory used to be that in difficult economic times, when a man couldn't afford to buy an overcoat and a suit, he would pick up his wardrobe with a hat," Rongione said. That's not what's happening now. Some of the hats on European runways would look perfectly fine on an Average Joe. (OK, an Average Joe who happens to hang out at the Smile or in the lobby of the Ace Hotel.)
"A regular guy could actually pull off some of these hats," Rongione added. "As opposed to something no one in his right mind would wear out of the house."
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