The Cat in the Hat

Luc Sante

Notes of a Fashion Voyeur

Only two boaters have been spotted this season, and no derbies at all. Toppers have not been sighted since the year of the big wind. Even those slanted caps once worn by all young men who pretended to drive English sports cars have mostly gone, and their elephantine denim relatives are seen only on the most venerable pool hustlers in medium-sized cities. While self-respecting mercenaries still wear paramilitary berets, they do so usually out of the country. The last man to wear a Basque beret died trying to rotate his tires with a cigarette in his mouth.

At one time all men wore hats, and the stray bareheaded fellow was as likely to invite attention as one who was barefooted. Character and social standing could be read in the make, model, pinch, and brim of one’s hat; to be hatless was to be a pariah. Besides keeping off the rain, and occasionally seeing use as a pillow, fan, jug, collection basket, filing cabinet, or cuspidor, the hat symbolized the reserve called for by good manners. Thus the doffing, a coyly rapid peekaboo that permitted no more than a fugitive glimpse of what lay beneath. These days, a man is more apt to twine his secrets in the roots of his elaborately styled coif, conveying that he was born and wakes daily with a hot-comb job of genetic origin and that his natural self can be scrutinized in the boyish openness of his mug.

Some hats, of course, are occupational and therefore passive and timeless, for example policemen’s and mailmen’s caps, firemen’s helmets, and the square paper hats worn by employees of fast-food chains. These are never seen off the job. Nor are construction helmets, although since they serve the media as a sign for the putative majority of joes, men wearing them can routinely be observed on television doing, say, the cancan.

Then, too, some men sport hats for reasons that are not of this world. The Amish and the Hasidim under their broad brims come to mind, as do the Rastafarians, who frequently tuck their locks into tarns and caps that swell to the size of miters. There are, of course, miters themselves to be considered, not to mention the red pastoral skimmer of the odd cardinal one spots in opera season.

The discretionary hat today is worn by the man who wishes to wave a flag. The gang member, for instance, has a flair for haberdashery that can be dazzling. The flat, black, broad-brimmed picador hat marks the Coney Island outlaw. It is worn tilted forward, with a lanyard that ties at the back of the head, just over the braid. Crew boys in the East are wearing nylon mesh caps this season, with the bill thrown sidewise a la Huntz Hall. Thus last season’s Pittsburgh Pirate lids have been replaced with a rather more casual golf aspect. Cholos in the West go for porkpies, brim rolled up all around, although formalists among them favor wide-brim fedoras to match their zoot suits. Elsewhere in the country, gangs with more brazenly sinister motives may prefer hairnets, or bunched or truncated nylon stockings. This effect looks wanton because it is, bearing no conceivable relation to any practical use, unless, of course, they are worn over the face as well.

Historical reference can play a part in the selection of certain headgear. Take, for example, the wide-brim fedora. Superflys retrieved the fedora from nostalgia in the early 1970s, recognizing the element of badness in its solemnity, which bespoke the kind of noblesse oblige that would dictate flowers after the rub-out of rival bootleggers. The properly tilted fedora became a badge for hoodlums flaunting their executive ability. Nowadays such display is less favored, perhaps because it is being supplanted by the aforementioned boyish openness, and the fedora is spotted mainly on young white males who have seen too many movies.

Older men wear fedoras too, rather grandly in fact, at least in the West, where things like that seem to hang on longer. Their eastern cousins tend to sport the stingy-brim shapeless numbers that stood as the apologetic last mainstream style when the fashion had all but died out. It is interesting to note the gradual and consistent erosion of the brim over the years, as the classic men’s hat seemed to swallow itself up, becoming more repressed until it disappeared altogether.

In view of this trend, the cowboy hat certainly does not indicate repression. It has been largely eclipsed as a fashion for urbanites who seek an untamed look, but still holds sway in many rural areas. When the brim is nearly flattened against the crown on the sides, and is creased to a point at each end, the individual under it can be considered traditionally virile, but only if he drives a pickup truck. The proportion of a Texan’s girth to the width of his ten-gallon brim has long been an economic indicator in story and song. When combined with a business suit, the cowboy hat carries a time-honored oil-money panache. In fact, this is largely a product of eastern-seaboard mythomania, recently refueled by the lure of cash and sex promised by the likes of Dallas.

Caps emblazoned with the trademark of a truck manufacturer seem to be the leading current proof of masculinity, and so cross all barriers of age, race, and geography. These so-called gimme caps (as in “gimme a break”) have overtaken in popularity baseball caps as well as those formerly omnipresent fishing hats with turned-down brims and beer labels. How long their present hegemony will last cannot be said. It is clear, though, that the gimme cap is the hatter’s equivalent of the T-shirt. It is plain, cheap, and informal, and can be tricked up in any number of ways. Entrepreneurs attach horns, wings, antlers, names of authors, snappy slogans, and the beckoning badges of tourist attractions. The more lit up the citizen thus bedecked, the gaudier the embellishment is likely to be. Its absolute reduction could be observed for about five minutes in the recent fad for emblematic antennae.

In spite of all recent trends, Seventh Avenue is making tentative hatlike noises, and some of the cleft chins that dwell in certain sections of certain magazines are displaying further halftones, caused by the shade of fedora brims. This may be an augury; then again it may not. The return to elegance, though a seductive notion, is always a precarious sort of bet. In the political climate of this spring’s fashions, the appropriate hat might be more along the lines of the sombrero, for that lulling effect, or the propeller beanie, for those who wish to broaden their outlook.

Always in question is whether or not the average middle can actually get away with wearing hats. It has been observed, for instance, that while many black men can look elegant in the most outlandish headgear, their white counterparts often look as though they’ve strayed from a particularly riotous do with elements of the decor flapping about their ears.

If hats do disappear, their going is likely to please those who will regard such a disgrace as an evolutionary advance, comparable to the loss of the tail. Their victory is sure to be bitter, however, as is always the case with such negative signs of progress and the streamlining they bring in their wake. But there may yet be hope. Perhaps with the forthcoming depletion of possible new hairstyles, and the inevitable breakdown of all weather, everywhere, hats will regain their former status.