Hat

What do you look like, walking around London in your hat?

You look like a travelling evangelist; you look like you play for Jesus’ team.

You look like a juggler, or busker or street magician. When you walk onto the tube, you look like you have strange vaudevillian designs upon everybody in the carriage.

You look like you’re waiting for comments. A teenager in a stretch limo sticks her head out the window to yell at you.
“Nice hat!” she yells.
“Nice car!” you yell back, and though neither of you means a word of it, this brightens up the day considerably.

You look like a rocksta… no, you don’t. You look like a backing musician, and one of a particular stripe; you look like the pixie-faced keyboard player in an indie-revival festival stalwart, still touring Europe on the back of a freak mid-nineties summer smash, grinding out fifteen minute sets in the noonday heat in Roskilde and Rock Am Ring, wearing the hat to at least partly disguise all the damage and the depreciation that’s set in since your starring appearance in the video, you’ve got to remember, it was on heavy rotation on MTV from June until October, you couldn’t get away from it, with the chopper bicycles and the outsize sunglasses and you in your hat floating away over the English countryside, and, strange to say, that’s what life felt like back then, when you had youth and cash and style and a relationship with one of the girls out of Kenickie, and plans too, ambitious plans that stood a pretty decent chance of working out, and now that you think about it, it really is a remarkable fact that all you’ve managed to hold onto is the hat.

You look like a wanker.

You look like you know precious little about hats. You look like you don’t know if you’re wearing a trilby or a fedora or a derby. You look like you picked out the hat because it was the first item of headgear that ever fitted your oddly anvil shaped head, and you continue wearing it out of gratitude alone.

You look like Dr Gunther Von Hagen.

You look like a shy person who’s worked out that the best cure for self-consciousness is giving people a genuine reason to stare at you. And it’s surprising how many do. People stare and send out smiles with the stare, to reassure you the stare is benign, that they’re generally in favour of whatever it is you do. None of the attention is malicious. You’re not going out on a limb here, frankly. It’s not like anyone objects to hats.

You look like someone from the eighties, but you can’t remember who. “REM!” yells a black kid outside Leicester Square tube station, and you realise with a start that he is right, your hat (and what is it anyway? a homburg? a trilby? a hornby?) is practically identical to the one worn by Michael Stipe in the video for “The One I Love”, the one where he washes the feet of or nestles into the breast of a dark haired woman in a rocking chair while stop-motion flowers go off like roman candles, the first iconic “I am Michael Stipe, so suffused with pain it makes me numb” moment; in retrospect, the moment it all started to go tits-up for REM.

You look like everyone else, apart from the stupid hat you’re wearing. This is London, not Bray Main Street. And you’re nearly thirty-two! Why are you still looking for approval through your clothes? Do you think you’ll change history by being that bit less conformist, less conventionally stylish? Give it a rest, for all our sakes.

You look like your grandfather. You look like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Nikolai Khrushchev. You don’t look like John F Kennedy. JFK is, in fact, the reason you stand out. The story goes that JFK’s refusal to be photographed in a hat at his inauguration triggered the total collapse of the US hat industry (based in Dantford Connecticut, and exemplified by hubristic sounding companies like The Hat Corporation of America). When you get home, and throw your hat down on the chair, you read a review in the Independent on Sunday of Hatless Jack by Neil Steinberg, a social history of hat-wearing in the States, which examines and at least partially endorses this story. You wonder whether Kennedy got the same thrill as you just did, whenever he got up at the weekend and walked hatless through Washington. You also wonder whether it’s too tasteless to bring up the fact that the first hatless President was eventually, you know, shot in the head. Surely a wide-brimmed stetson would have easily outfoxed the gunmen. History would have changed completely if only the President had been that bit more conformist, more conventionally stylish. You wonder: did the Warren Commission call witnesses from the Hat Corporation of America?