If you want to get ahead, get a hat

Former Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes campaigns in Sydney's Martin Place for World War I recruitment. Note the smart hats.

Scouring the newspaper’s picture library for a photo to illustrate a story on referendums in Australia, I came across a 1916 image of an animated PM Billy Hughes in Sydney’s Martin Place during a recruitment campaign for the armed forces in WWI.

The photograph was freighted with historical significance but, shallow fellow that I am, what caught my eye was the array of smart hats adorning the crowd. For decades after the birth of the camera all the men in photos of city street scenes, watching cricket Tests or football matches, are wearing hats. Then from the 1960s hats all but vanish.

Some trace their disappearance to US president John F. Kennedy’s hatless inauguration in 1961; many attribute it to the growth in ownership of cars, whose roofline is not accommodating to the trilby; some blame the hirsute self-expression of hippies and pop stars; others see rebellion against an outdated class system that put flat caps on the working man, fedoras on their social superiors, and bowlers on upper management.

Top hats remain, but only as the province of aristocrats, Etonians, tipsy governors-general and anyone who can scam an invitation into the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. Farmers and country folk still wear broad-brimmed hats against the sun, the private-school boater hangs around, and we’ll ignore the baseball cap as beneath contempt, but an elegant hat these days is seen as often as a night parrot.

The famous Sombreros Maquedano hat shop in Seville, founded in 1896.

If it’s possible to miss something you never experienced, then I miss that universal hat-wearing, but it’s a bittersweet lament. For much as I would love to stroll out in the kind of hat that would lend me the brooding magnificence of Humphrey Bogart or the jaunty style of Cary Grant, my tiny personal tragedy is that for me, no such hat will ever exist.

My daughters once chortled that I should consider a red plastic hat with a spike underneath to pin it to my head, their hilarious way of comparing me to a potato; but deep down (actually, on the surface) I know they – and the dozens of heartless friends and total strangers who have made similar observations – are right.

I look a complete buffoon in any kind of headgear, except those flat-fronted American trucker caps, which instead make me look like a gormless serial killer (as they do everyone else, by the way).

Not long ago I tried to solve the problem the socialist way, by throwing money at it. It was in the Sierpes shopping street in Seville, at the beautiful, classic Sombreros Maquedano.

The elderly gentleman who served me did his patient best, but eventually we agreed he couldn’t help me; it was perhaps the hatmakers’ first failure in more than 125 years of operation. As he muttered “Adiós, Señor Cabeza de Patata,” I think he had a tear in his eye; on reflection, probably of laughter.

It’s amusing to recall that when I moved from reporting to my first proper editing job in journalism, the sign that I’d joined the grown-ups was that my new contract specified I was to wear a suit and tie at work. It sounds quaint now; indeed you could wander for days in this building without seeing a tie at any level of management – with one exception.

There is a senior editor on this newspaper who in the 30 years we’ve been friends has continued to dress immaculately in a three-piece suit and tie, in the cooler months adding a snappy trench coat to his ensemble.

To spare his embarrassment I won’t name him (other than to say he’s neither the lead singer of The Doors nor Australia’s greatest trumpet player), but he’s a beacon of elegance in an increasingly scruffy world.

Sad to say, this gentleman also wears a fedora to (but of course not in) the office. I really should celebrate that lovely hat as the crown atop his sartorial excellence, but no, I’m too small-minded and blinded by envy. The lucky bugger just looks so damn good in it.