Hats and Manners

Bare heads, like bare breasts, are wanton, casual, accessible, overt. Covered heads are modest, prudent, impenetrable, covert. So it is hard, in this immodest age, to conceive of the full scale return of hats, even though the fashion seers warn us that we’ll all be bereted and cloche-knitted this season. Women may be as submissive as ever to the dictates of haute couture (though I sense a new indifference to changing fashions in this pennywise period) and, indeed, they may welcome the subterfuge of hats after years of prominent hair. Still, it seems to me that the time is not ripe for hats: at least not serious hats, although our fashion whimsy may incline us momentarily toward the dash and theatricality of a shady brim. Contemporary social life is not austere or classist enough to sustain the fashion honestly.

Hats are mechanisms for displaying a modest respect for social norms or the social hierarchy, a symbol whose manipulation (addition or removal) indicates reverence, as in the presence of a god or a lady. Hats are coy—circumspect as a fig leaf—so doffing and donning are social, sexual acts. (Men disclose their sex before ladies; ladies conceal theirs before God.) Therefore, hats and the elaborate signaling system associated with them are incompatible with bare breasts, casual see-through-feel-through clothes, easy intimacy. Nothing may be taken for granted when a woman wears a serious hat seriously.

SM

About the Author

Susan Schwartz McDonald

Bare heads, like bare breasts, are wanton, casual, accessible, overt. Covered heads are modest, prudent, impenetrable, covert. So it is hard, in this immodest age, to conceive of the full scale return of hats, even though the fashion seers warn us that we’ll all be bereted and cloche-knitted this season. Women may be as submissive as ever to the dictates of haute couture (though I sense a new indifference to changing fashions in this pennywise period) and, indeed, they may welcome the subterfuge of hats after years of prominent hair. Still, it seems to me that the time is not ripe for hats: at least not serious hats, although our fashion whimsy may incline us momentarily toward the dash and theatricality of a shady brim. Contemporary social life is not austere or classist enough to sustain the fashion honestly.

Hats are mechanisms for displaying a modest respect for social norms or the social hierarchy, a symbol whose manipulation (addition or removal) indicates reverence, as in the presence of a god or a lady. Hats are coy—circumspect as a fig leaf—so doffing and donning are social, sexual acts. (Men disclose their sex before ladies; ladies conceal theirs before God.) Therefore, hats and the elaborate signaling system associated with them are incompatible with bare breasts, casual see-through-feel-through clothes, easy intimacy. Nothing may be taken for granted when a woman wears a serious hat seriously.