It varied somewhat over time, but September 15th is the date most regarded as Felt Hat Day.
Okay, I know what you’re thinking, this is the sort of silly concession granted by politicians to lobbyists who don’t actually raise very much money for them… like, five thousand dollars might get you a Peanut Butter Fudge Day in West Des Moines.
Not at all. This used to be very serious stuff. People even got hurt over it. Check this out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_Hat_Riot (“Straw Hat Riot” on Wikipedia)
(I always thought that “Straw Hat Riot” was one of the best chance candidates for a band name I’d ever heard).
Saying that things change over time works both ways, there are ways in which the past was fundamentally different, and not just the very distant past.
Once upon a time, men wore hats. Everyone wore hats. They had for thousands of years. There were good reasons for it too, but most had to do with being outside a lot, including outside of cars.
In any case, today is traditionally the first day that it is socially obligatory for a man to wear a felt hat, and no longer acceptable to wear a straw hat (boater, Panama) outside of the Tropics. Felt hats were worn until Straw Hat Day on May 15th.
Good and bad news- I have a lot of felt hats and don’t mind wearing them a bit, but whereas straw hats tend to “dress down” well, many traditional fedora styles just DO NOT seem to go well with very casual clothing… which in this day and age is a problem, since fewer and fewer people dress up for fewer and fewer occasions every year. There’s just something fundamentally ridiculous about wearing a slate-gray snap-brim fedora with a wide black ribbon with a t-shirt, shorts and sandals. It doesn’t work.
I’ve attacked the problem largely by styling my own hats so that they are less formal, usually starting with an open-crown Akubra Campdraft. Some are patterned after the Akubra “RM”, one a frank and no-doubt inferior copy of an earlier iteration of the Black Sheep Hats Tumblehome. I end up with hats that are not quite classic fedoras, not Western, not completely Australian, with thin ribbons or leather hatbands that make them more casual, and by going with tans, browns and greens.
– Robert the Wombat
I also enjoy my hats. I find it difficult to get my hands on the trilby-fedora hybrid or even to gather reliable info on old hat styles. Whenever I stumble across legit looking info or a hat that is good quality without the huge pricetag it feels like finding treasure. Any good suggestions on websites or places to increase my collection?
I have had women make suggestive comments about my hat as if in an attempt to trick me into admitting I’m a mysoginist. It’s a strange experience as I don’t go out of my way to speak with random strangers, but suddenly find myself being subtlety interrogated by one.
This mostly involves a lot of quizzes on the history of the hat style, how it’s made, different materials, as if I must know everything about the hat if I’m going to wear it.
Hi, thanks for taking the time to comment, and welcome.
For those few of us who still note such things, Straw Hat Day is almost upon us, May 15th. Guess I should post something.
I own a lot of hats… vintage Stetson, more modern Stetson, Borsalino, Mallory, a bunch of summer and one winter cloth Tilleys, but most of mine are Akubras, reworked Akubras or made from open-crown (unformed) Akubra Campdrafts. The felt quality is certainly not as good as you get with real vintage hats or from true custom makers like Art Fawcett, Black Sheep or Optimo (most custom makers use Winchester blanks, I don’t know where Optimo gets theirs, they do generally get better color saturation), I don’t have ANY of those… but I honestly can’t imagine resting easy wearing a three or four-hundred dollar hat in windy conditions with traffic all around, or sweating heavily in one under the beating sun should the need arise. Modern society is just not geared for hat-wearers, and it often makes it hard on hats, they’re constantly in danger of being crushed or trampled. The (rabbit) felt quality of Akubras isn’t in the same category as that of good modern beaver or vintage beaver, but it’s far, far better than anything typically available in stores in the US.
A lot has to do with the style you’re going for. These days I insist on a full, non-tapered crown, but since you mention the trilby style you may be looking for a smaller crown. I find that with tapered or low crowns, while the hat may look fine on a stand or in hand, it never looks “right” on my head. You just can’t fake the real vintage look where the crown takes off from the brim at a hard, firm 90 degree angle, and there’s enough of it to form it fully without going low.
Part of the reason that you may not be able to find a lot of information on old styles is that if you go back earlier than the 50’s, it was more and more common for hats to be shipped to stores with unshaped brims and crowns, and they were shaped by the customer or the salesman to taste and to suit the customer’s head and/or face shape. The old felts were so soft and supple that this could be done innumerable times without harm, so one hat could be shaped different ways each time it was tried on. Steam or water might have been used to try to get the crown to keep it’s shape, but often not- if you look at Jimmy Stewart in some of the old films, he’ll take off his hat, practically wring it out like a dishrag to show nervousness, then restore it with a couple of quick motions to just the way it was. I doubt any modern felt comes close.
As I mentioned, I have a couple of the first-model Akubra Federations, but these days I buy Akubra Campdrafts then form them to my liking, sometimes changing the ribbon for my choice of hatbands and/or trimming the brim, though I generally like the older broad-brimmed styles. The Campdraft comes with the brim flat and the crown just domed, not shaped, and I use steam to get the shape I want. I buy them from these two dealers, depending mostly on the model and color I’m looking for.:
http://everythingaustralian.com.au (Everything Australian, main)
http://everythingaustralian.com.au/campdraft-hat.html (Everything Australian, Campdraft)
https://hatsdirect.com/ (hatsdirect/Hattery main)
https://hatsdirect.com/collections/the-akubra-range-1/products/campdraft-open-crown (hatsdirect/Hattery Campdraft)
Sorry to say I have no real suggestions for dealing with social resistance, other than the obvious- the more of us that wear them, and the more often we do, the less unwanted attention it will attract. That seems to be happening, slowly. Though I still see relatively few men wearing “real” hats, there are more of them than in recent years past, and more every year. The lack of readily-available GOOD hats has a lot to do with that, I think a lot of men try one or two in their lives, and give it up as a miserable experience, not realizing they’ve just been sold vastly inferior hats.
As for the lore of hats, you can easily become as much of an expert as you care to be, the information is out there. I wholly recommend hanging out here to learn, not just about hats but all attire and accouterments with roots in the past:
http://www.thefedoralounge.com/forums/ (The Fedora Lounge, forums)
I used to spend a LOT of time there (under another name), and I learned a great deal when I did. You also can get in on group buys and special merchant deals. It’s an extremely valuable resource on an amazingly broad range of subjects of interest to those intelligent enough not to dismiss the past. Or you can just ask here, I’ll be glad to share whatever I know.
Hope this helps,
– RtW