TO TOP ALL HATS

I do not wear hats.

Yet somehow I have a collection of them and when they fell on me during a recent closet visit, I started to think about them.  Fedora, cap, fez, plastic bowler from Halloween…every made thing has a design history and hats are no exception.

No one knows when the first hat was designed but there is one depicted in a tomb from Thebes of a man wearing a conical straw hat.  That puts it back at least two and a half millennia ago but I suspect that they do not appear in the cave paintings simply because they could not be eaten.

Since then, hats and head coverings have been in constant transition – the usual design evolution – and made of every material known from felt to fur, silk to satin, wool, linen, cotton, paper, metal, straw, metal, you name it.  And given our very human design obsession, hats come in all shapes and sizes as well, both winning and weird.  Chaplets, coifs, berets, pillboxes, caps, chapeaux, chullos, turbans, sombreros, the list goes on and on. 

Yet the hat is an oddity in the world of clothing design; as rich and varied as every other made thing, but not exactly necessity mothering invention.  True, they keep the head warm (sort of) and deflect the rain (so do umbrellas), and even block the rays of sun (though not as well a decent roof).  They also flatten the hair, snag on doorways, cause massive storage problems, and look notoriously ridiculous in any culture but their own.  Can you think of a single hat design – whether the conical henin of the 16th century, the stiff bonnet of the 18th century, the absurd stetson of the 19th, or the daft bowler of the 20th – that has any rational purpose other than as advertisement for itself?  Neither can I. 

But as I stood there studying, I wondered…was there one hat that stood above the rest, a greatest hat in history?  An ultimate or perhaps quintessential hat?  A hat of all hats?  This was dangerous territory; the best of anything is purely whimsical yet I did have one hat that struck me as the best candidate because it seemed to me to be the most nonsensical, least practical, and best example of a “hat for hat’s sake.”  It was a hat that towered above all others…literally.

It was the top hat.

Why I – who never wore hats – happened to own a top hat of all things, was a complete mystery.  But there it was and it made no sense practically or fashionably either.  It looked ridiculous but top hats were all the rage back in the day and when Charles Dickens wrote in the Pickwick Papers his much-repeated phrase, “If that is true, I’ll eat my hat,” he meant nothing less than the feast of the stovepipe.  Even its debut captured the absurdity of the top hat.  It first appeared on the head of John Etherington, a London haberdasher, who emerged on the Strand on January 15, 1797 with a new black stovepipe top hat of his own design.  The hat caused such an uproar that Etherington was arrested for disturbing the peace.  On his return from custody, three orders for the new hat awaited him. 

Design is often about solving a problem that no one thinks is a problem at all.