hats

Style of Eye

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hats

October 14th 2007 23:12

Hats are a curious thing. The can look exceptionally cool, or down right silly. I’m hat fussy. I’m also hat intolerant. I really only dig certain hats. On the whole I think of them as masks for people to hide an element of insecurity behind, in an unconscious kind of way, I might even proclaim a shy kind of vanity.

I can’t wear hats on the whole. My head is too big. That sounds conceited, but it’s simply that I have a large girth. My head, that is. Ahem. Most hats don’t fit me. And when I do find one that fits, it just looks wrong, because as I said, I’m hat fussy.

But that doesn’t mean that I don’t admire or appreciate some hats on other people. Hats can be almost unassuming, purely practical, and then they can be very ostentatious, all about the parade. Take Melbourne Cup day for example. Then take winter. And then there’s all the hat etiquette; having to politely remove your hat when you enter a certain premises. What’s that about?

I wore a beret for a while. And I had a little Greek sailor’s cap too. Talk about quietly ostentatious! But the hat I wore for the longest time (until I lost the damn thing) was a ghetto style cap which I had all my dreadlocks tucked under. That was a very cool hat. What a shame. I guess the street claimed it back.

I lot of men wear hats, especially caps, because they’re going bald. Of course, they’re only aggravating the problem by covering the bald patch. The hair follicles need invigorating, and it ain’t getting shit under a cap. Thankfully I don’t have that problem.

As a boy there was a Dr. Seuss book which gave me the creeps: The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. It’s the Middle Ages and young Bart goes to remove his little feathered cap as the King rides past, but discovers much to his surprise, and much to the disdain of the King’s men, that he has another identical hat underneath. So he removes that. But there’s another. And another, and another, and another, and another …

Poor Bart is arrested and whisked away by the King’s men, and so unfolds poor Bartholomew Cubbins hatted plight. It’s a surreal book with a subtext of quiet rebellion and anti-conformity. Such is most of the work of Dr. Seuss. Brilliant, of course, but it chilled me as a boy, nevertheless. I feared poor Bart would have his head cut off as punishment for the crime of not bowing to the King and removing his hat.

So, without further adieu, hats off!

Some fine head adornments indeed. I think I'd like three hat boxes to go; the panama fedora, the Mad Hatter top, and the red sombrero deluxe, thank you very much!

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