Top Hats
The black silk topper was the first in line. Developed from the high felt stovepipe hat, it became the hat worn by postrevolution aristocracy and an emblem of conservative capitalism. Its origins were far less formal. Like many other hats in history, the topper, also known as “chapeau haut de forme,” was a French design, at first causing outrage and dismay in London in the 1790s. According to the Mayfair Gazette, this new tall black hat “frightened people, made children cry, and dogs bark.” John Heatherington, the London haberdasher who dared to wear it, was arrested and charged with “inciting the breach of the peace.” Despite this turbulent beginning, the high black hat was gradually adopted by gentlemen of distinction in the West.
The construction and making of the high topper was innovative, too. The hat was not shaped in beaver felt but constructed from stiffened calico, which was covered with silk plush fabric and brushed around repeatedly until smooth and shiny. Mercury was used to enhance the hat’s blackness and was later discovered to cause mental disorder, hence the popular term “mad as a hatter.” The height and the shape of the crown varied, the tallest being the “kite-high dandy,” with a height of 7 inches (21cm). The diameter of the flat top varied as well and with it the “waisted” shape of the chimney crown. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a collapsible version of the hat was devised, known as “chapeau claque” or “chapeau Gibus,” after its French inventor. This ingenious design could be folded flat-concertina-fashion-and sprung back into shape by the flick of the fist, thus making storage much easier.
Bowlers
The bowler hat, called derby in the United States, was designed in 1849 at the height of the industrial revolution in Britain. Like the top hat, it quickly became a classic wardrobe item and a quintessential badge of Englishness. Named after John and William Bowler, hatters from Stockport, an industrial city in the north of England, it was to become the first mass-produced hat in history. A young English aristocrat who wanted a new hunting hat ordered the original design. Lock and Company, hatters of St. James’s in London, since 1676, had been given a brief to supply a brown, round-crowned felt hat, practical and hard wearing, but also dashing and modern. Most importantly, the hat was to be hard and protective as it was to be used for riding. The making of felt hats was traditionally done by small factories in South London, who experimented with stiffening of felt in various ways. A substance called shellac was perfected by mixing a dark treacle-like extract from a parasite insect found in Southeast Asia with methylated spirit. The felt hoods were manually rolled and beaten in the hot and steaming mixture, before being blocked and dried on wooden hat blocks. The procedure was arduous and dirty, but the key to mass production, making the hat affordable to the middle-classes.
The industrial revolution in Britain and all over Western Europe brought important social changes and a shift from agriculture to factories. Factories needed not only workers but also managers, bookkeepers, and accountants, all new middle-class men who traveled on the newly invented railways wearing black bowler or “iron hats.” With its sturdy, solid look the hat was the perfect fashion and style accessory for social climbers in Victorian Britain: a smart, discreet hat that turned every man into a gentleman. The earl of Derby introduced the hat to the United States, hence the name given to it there.
The bowler held its place in fashion for over one hundred years, its distinctive silhouette making it the most widely recognized hat image in history. The bowler hat was immortalized in art, comedy, and literature, and it is still exploited in advertising today. Charlie Chaplin made the hat famous in his satiric silent films of the early 1920s, a comedy act, which was followed by Laurel and Hardy a few years later. Samuel Beckett put bowler hats on the tramps in his famous play, Waiting for Godot (“He can’t think without his hat,” says one of the characters.) Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera features bowler hats and Stanley Kubrick’s anarchist in Clockwork Orange also wears a bowler. René Magritte’s paintings are famous because of the bowler hats on his surrealistic figures. Sculpture has immortalized the hat’s image too, in a famous bronze statue with a bowler hat called The Man in the Open Air by Ellie Nadelman at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It epitomizes the link between the Old and the New World, the transition between convention and modernity.
Twentieth Century Headwear
During the early twentieth century, a black bowler hat became synonymous with financial affairs and was the headwear for German businessmen during the years of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933), but the Nazi regime branded it “Judenstahlhelm,” outlawed it, and used it in anti-Semitic propaganda. The bowler remained the recognizable attire of bankers in the City of London until the 1970s and is still worn by a few city lawyers today.
The homburg was a German hat, similar to the bowler, but with a higher and lightly dented crown and is named after its city of origin. It is said that King Edward VII of Britain saw the hat worn by his German cousin Kaiser William and thus started the fashion in England. British politicians like Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden also liked to wear this hat. The American fedora and the slightly smaller British version, the trilby, are felt hats with dented crowns and brims turned up at the back, and down at the front, shading the eyes. Soft felt hats brought a more casual look to men’s fashion, which had changed from black frock coats to suits and raincoats. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fedora helped to change the image of his presidency after the assassination of President McKinley, who had always worn a black top hat. The soft felt trilby was originally a bohemian hat, worn by artists and modern thinkers who wanted to make a stand against the old conservative values of the previous century. In the 1930s and 1940s the hat took on a gangster role in the United States, which was exploited by many moviemakers and film stars. It was also the hat worn by newspapermen, crime reporters, and Mafia bosses, whose shady expressions were obscured beneath the stylish brim.
Panama
The panama hat was the summer hat for the modern man around the turn of the twentieth century. The hat was woven using the finest jipijapas straw, flexible enough to be rolled into a narrow tube for packaging and transportation. Panamas were handwoven in Ecuador and shipped through the Panama Canal, which gave the hat its name. Growing and preparing the straw was a lengthy procedure and so was the weaving of a hat, which could take a skilled worker up to four weeks. The finest and costliest panama hat is called a Montecristi fino-fino. With not many skilled hat weavers left in Ecuador, this hat has become a collector’s item. Cheaper versions and paper panamas are very popular and commercially mass-produced in many other countries today.
Boater
The boater was another popular straw hat of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. The straw was plaited, sewn in a spiral, stiffened and blocked hard into its distinct shape of a flat crown and stiff flat brim. The design of the boater is derived from the shape of sailor’s hats and suited to the debonair informal look men liked around the turn of the twentieth century.
Stetson
The Stetson is a truly American hat, stylish, protective, and unmistakably masculine; a hat of the prairie and the most treasured possession of a cowboy, it evokes silver-screen bravery and passion of the Wild West. Its origins are in Philadelphia, where John Batterson Stetson established his first hat factory in the 1880s, which was to grow into one of the great American enterprises of the twentieth century. Having learned the principles of hat making from his father, John Stetson first sought fame and fortune by trekking 750 miles to the west, and felting and making hats by the campfire for his fellow travelers. He did not find gold, but his skills and tenacity helped him build the largest hat empire in the world. The making of a modern Stetson is still based on the old techniques of felting and blocking, requiring thirteen different stages in production, thus making the hat the costliest item of a rancher’s clothing. The image of the battered cowboy hat has given way to a range of stylish models for Texan businessmen, topped by the famous “Boss of the Plains,” as worn by J.R. of the famous 1980s TV series Dallas.
Cloth Caps
Cloth caps are flat hats with visors traditionally cut and sewn from woolen cloth. The image of the cap was a modest, practical one in keeping with a workingman’s life. The saying, “cap in hand,” illustrates the social position of the cap-as does the Russian poet Alexander Blok’s verse, “Caps tilted, fag drooping, everyone looks like a jailbird on the run.” The cap, like other hats, changed its image and is worn in the early 2000s by wealthy gentlemen when shooting grouse or playing golf rather than by laborers going to work at a factory. Capmakers or cappers, also made livery caps, military caps, and various styles for sports caps, like the baseball cap, which has become the universal hat of youth culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Finally, the beret, which was in existence long before the twentieth century, has evolved from a French Pyrenean shepherd’s hat to the most widely worn military hat in the world. The colors and badges may vary, but the beret is now a universal soldier’s hat as well as the favorite hat of revolutionary guerrilla groups. A French mountain regiment, les chasseurs alpines always wore dark red berets and presented one to the British Field Marshal Montgomery after World War I. He wore this beret, called “tarte alpine” during his command of the British forces during World War II.
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Why Communication 
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