“Hats, were made for your head,
For when it’s cold outside to keep you warm instead....”
It was just a silly ditty – and it’s probably telling it’s the only part of the song I can remember. I was resolutely anti-hat at the time, with my main experience being forced by my mother to wear ugly toques when the other kids just used their hood or had no headwear at all.
Eventually, I embraced toques because they do keep you warm after all.
In my university years, I uncharacteristically bought a black wool beret at The Bay one winter and thus began my journey of becoming a girl in a hat. At first, I wore it practically. The little point at the top betrayed it as a beret but I pulled it down over my ears because hats are supposed to keep you warm, right?
But I grew to love the thing, and replaced it with an identical cap after leaving the original behind somewhere by accident.
I’m not sure what prompted the shift, but at some point I began wearing it French style (cocked to the side) and have suffered a cold ear for beauty ever since. The payoff has been random strangers complimenting my beret.
A few years later, I admitted hats are actually convenient to keep the sun of the face, so I purchased a basic sun hat at Sears (after first accidentally stealing it by just walking out of the department store with it, just as I had walked around the department store with it).
A transformation had begun.
I recently stumbled across a YouTube video asking why we never wear hats anymore. It pointed out that hats used to be an indispensable part of an outfit but now they are largely forgotten in North America save for baseball caps on men of a certain type.
The video became cluttered with an off-topic interview with a modern day milliner so I gave up on finding out the answer. I had already decided on my own: cars.
Along with ruining the design of cities, our health, and our social fabric, cars, I suspect, are also responsible for the demise of hats.
Initially, cars provided a new market for milliners: these high speed but unenclosed travelling machines necessitated just the right kind of hat to keep your hair in place and in style. But once the roofs descended on the automobiles, hats just kind of got in the way, so when the 1920s cloche hat trend went out, the habit of hat wearing went with it.
With the purchase of a glorious sun hat for Indonesia (which Air Canada and possibly Jakarta Airport deprived me of for most of my trip) added to my repertoire, I was already on a slow journey to hat wearing but with this new revelation (well, self-made and possibly erroneous conclusion) about it, I’ve decided as an act of resistance against car culture to embrace hat wearing.
It’s resistance with style!
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