Languagehat links to a fashion article in the NY Times that says hats are coming back! This is certainly good news. I was about to write “There’s just something about hats…” but you know, everyone uses that tired beginning to some meaningless meandering. Nuts to that.
For guys, wearing a hat in these times is one measure of a true man. You know how I know? Because up until this past weekend, I was afraid of wearing my fedora out in public. And until this past weekend, I never truly felt like a man. That’s something you just know, “balls to bones”, as a certain Matrix-y oracle once said. Manhood is more than what you wear, but damned if it’s not been slighted of late. People think fashion is shallow as a meaningful measure of a man. You can thank metrosexuality for turning it into a bloomy, Gap-infested, scented velour hugfest. That’s not manhood! That’s emasculation!
Sunday I wore my gray size 15 1/2 fedora on Main Street of Blacksburg with an outrageous purple silk (actually, it was rayon, but the feel! the flow! Frou frou!) suit I bought at the thrift store for $10 and change. It was the most liberating feeling I’ve known in a long while, enhanced by the cute girls who walked by, smiling. One of them even called us “fellas”. I kid you not!
Ahhh! I thought to myself. Filmmaking really is a glamour career. But truly, they weren’t wondering what we were doing. Any fool could see we were filming. No, what they really were saying was, “Great duds!” And more to the point, “What a hat!”
Despite the fact that I had forgotten my cane (the earth might have trembled at me had I brought it), and I had no platform shoes or bling-bling, and I’m white and can’t rap (we were filming a rap video), the response from these strangers was most gratifying. I felt good in my hat. Alive. At peace with myself and with the world. Strange how a small matter like wearing a hat can change one’s perspective. Yet, in a way, it’s appropriate. Forget the metaphors, or the deep significant tie-in with your body–the hat exists in a purely physical place and form, and it exists as a tribute to the great men who came before us, who wore hats and accomplished great deeds. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Mozart, John Wayne, Charlie Chaplin, Lord Nelson, the Wright Brothers, and even Jesus wore a hat of sorts (though it was meant as scorn, it is considered by Christians to be a mark of his redemption, and that’s manly to the core).
Remember the 60’s? Hats fell out of fashion then. Not coincidentally, that was when men began to lose all context for manhood. Suddenly, men had nothing that would distinguish them; man’s feminisation and social emasculation began with fashion, and it has sadly remained for forty years, though it seems as if the tide may be turning. Men are beginning to realize they’ve been shortchanged. The social meaning of hats is significant, and it is good news that they’re coming back.
So I say fie to the hat-hating bareheads who have too long suppressed the manliness of the hat. For bowlers and fedoras, stetsons and derbies, trilbies, and Panamas…Fight!
Oh yes, and women should start wearing those fur-lined caps, Kangol berets, gauchos, and straw hats again. Viva la pre-1960’s!
UPDATE: Lileks is writing about fashion too! Must be a two-blogger meme.