Two books on men's hat styles
I know i owe one more post on SPESA, on the suppliers who were there, but first i'd like to mention two books of interest to the milliners, hatters, and scholars of historical fashion.
The first is Hatless Jack: The President, the Fedora, and the History of an American Style, by Neil Steinberg. I originally read this book as part of the research I did on the supply chain of the Stetson fedora for a textile industry business class i took at NC State's College of Textiles.
As the title implies, it's a history of the fedora and a cultural analysis of the decline of hat-wearing in the 20th century--which is far more complex than simply "Jack Kennedy didn't wear one at his inauguration and bam, the next day all men throughout the Western world threw their fedoras in the trash." It's also broader in scope than that, addressing the development, rise, and fall of the top hat style and the homburg, as well as straw styles like the boater and the Panama. The book is full of fascinating pieces of history, like the Straw Hat Riots in NYC in the 1920s, where gangs of roving crazies would snatch men's straw hats off their heads and smash them in the streets, purportedly in outrage at their flaunting straw headwear past September 15th, the recognized "felt hat day," after which men were supposed to switch back to felt fedoras and homburgs. All in all an informative, interesting, and accessible read.
Via the bibliography for the above book, i also picked up Fred Miller Robinson's The Man in the Bowler Hat: His History and Iconography, which is exactly what you'd suppose: a book about the invention and adaptation of the bowler hat style throughout history. This one is a much more dense, despite being over 100 pages shorter and full of photos and artwork, and is clearly aimed at a much more academic readership. Robinson has ferreted out every possible reference to the bowler in cultural consciousness from the films of Chaplin to the paintings of Magritte to the drama of Beckett. Sometimes i'm in the mood for all that hyper-analytical signs-and-semiotics writing (see also: almost went the route of the dramaturg), so I enjoyed it, but it's no popcorn beach book.
I'm hoping to have time to write up the last SPESA entry tomorrow, but if not, it's because i'm off to NYC for a week with one of my students on Wednesday morning. I may be totally off the grid for the duration, but even if so, i'll have that writeup plus a whole mess of fashion and costume exhibit reviews upon my return, plus hopefully the continuation of some projects like the commedia mask collection and the hat block casting...
The first is Hatless Jack: The President, the Fedora, and the History of an American Style, by Neil Steinberg. I originally read this book as part of the research I did on the supply chain of the Stetson fedora for a textile industry business class i took at NC State's College of Textiles.
As the title implies, it's a history of the fedora and a cultural analysis of the decline of hat-wearing in the 20th century--which is far more complex than simply "Jack Kennedy didn't wear one at his inauguration and bam, the next day all men throughout the Western world threw their fedoras in the trash." It's also broader in scope than that, addressing the development, rise, and fall of the top hat style and the homburg, as well as straw styles like the boater and the Panama. The book is full of fascinating pieces of history, like the Straw Hat Riots in NYC in the 1920s, where gangs of roving crazies would snatch men's straw hats off their heads and smash them in the streets, purportedly in outrage at their flaunting straw headwear past September 15th, the recognized "felt hat day," after which men were supposed to switch back to felt fedoras and homburgs. All in all an informative, interesting, and accessible read.
Via the bibliography for the above book, i also picked up Fred Miller Robinson's The Man in the Bowler Hat: His History and Iconography, which is exactly what you'd suppose: a book about the invention and adaptation of the bowler hat style throughout history. This one is a much more dense, despite being over 100 pages shorter and full of photos and artwork, and is clearly aimed at a much more academic readership. Robinson has ferreted out every possible reference to the bowler in cultural consciousness from the films of Chaplin to the paintings of Magritte to the drama of Beckett. Sometimes i'm in the mood for all that hyper-analytical signs-and-semiotics writing (see also: almost went the route of the dramaturg), so I enjoyed it, but it's no popcorn beach book.
I'm hoping to have time to write up the last SPESA entry tomorrow, but if not, it's because i'm off to NYC for a week with one of my students on Wednesday morning. I may be totally off the grid for the duration, but even if so, i'll have that writeup plus a whole mess of fashion and costume exhibit reviews upon my return, plus hopefully the continuation of some projects like the commedia mask collection and the hat block casting...