There’s something hot about a hat

When an American describes a woman as wearing a ‘Park Avenue Helmet’ you know exactly what is meant. This is a hairdo so precise and sculpted that it trembles, category-wise, between coiffure and armour. Both natural and artificial, it also accurately signals social status.

The link between hats, hair and caste was first made by James Laver in his 1937 classic Taste and Fashion, a book not yet bettered in its field. Oddly, it does not appear in the bibliography of Drake Stutesman’s new cultural history of headwear. But to be fair to NYU’s Professor Stutesman, she does make the compensatingly interesting point that one of the reasons for the decline of the woman’s hat in the 1950s was the introduction of the deadly fixative hairspray, which made the Park Avenue Helmet possible in the first place.

Hat is a good and handsome book, despite its intellectual origins being in Roland Barthes’s mischievous essays deconstructing pop culture. I was always worried I might stumble across a Barthesian ‘signifying matrix’. I know about these things because, to confess, at the right-on university which once employed me, I proposed an inter-disciplinary course on ‘Soap’, which the faculty board took more seriously than I had intended.

In this style, Stutesman’s previous book was a cultural history of the snake. Americans do not always possess irony, so we must take her word for it when she also describes herself as a ‘radical literary novelist’. But headwear is a preoccupation: she is engaged long-term to a study of Mr John, the designer of Vivien Leigh’s hats in Gone With the Wind.

The hat has been known in all cultures since prehistory, evocative of power and status. Bishops and professors have seats and chairs, but they also have peculiar headwear.