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When Emily Post laid down her rules regarding top hats, she included
one that had nothing to do with etiquette. "Wear it level on your
head," she said. Now, I’ll accept Mrs. Post’s authority when it
comes to whether I should take my hat off in an elevator, but as to how
my hat should sit on my head, no thank you. As it happens, she was dead
wrong about the top hat. A man should not wear it flat on his head. He
should wear it tilted forward and to one side - very slightly though, no
more than 10 degrees in either direction - about the same angle Lord
Ribblesdale wore his in the famous portrait by John Singer Sargent.
I single out Lord Ribblesdale, because as he is seen in the Sargent
portrait he represents the ultimate in top-hatted aplomb. He wears a
long riding coat, a white waistcoat, shiny black riding boots, and
jodhpurs. One hand rests on his hip, the other clutches a riding crop,
and he looks straight out of the canvas in a strong, forthright manner.
The painting is a study in refined self-assurance, which is precisely
the attitude the top hat was intended to convey. This is the hat, after
all, that inspired the expression "high hat" as a designation
of arrogance and snobbishness. Ribblesdale himself was the epitome of
the Edwardian aristocrat; he was master of the backhands and
lord-in-waiting to Queen Victoria. The hat that sat so perfectly on his
head was the hat that dominated the nineteenth century.
This was a surprise to everybody, because his top hat caused a riot
the first time it was seen in London. The perpetrator was a haberdasher
name John Hetherington, who designed it, made it and was the first
person to wear it into the street. According to a contemporary newspaper
account, passersby panicked at the sight. Several women fainted,
children screamed, dogs yelped, and an errand boy’s arm was broken
when he was trampled by the mob. Hetherington was hauled into court for
wearing "a tall structure having a shining luster calculated to
frighten timid people." It was much ado about nothing, really;
Hetherington had merely concocted a silk-covered variation of the
contemporary riding hat, which had a wider brim, a lower crown, and was
made of beaver. There was initial resistance to Hetherington’s silk
topper from those who wanted to continue wearing beaver hats. But in
1850 Prince Albert started wearing top hats made of "hatter’s
plush" (a fine silk shag), and that effectively settled the
questions; coincidentally it also all but wiped out the beaver-trapping
industry in America.
It’s easy to see from old photographs and drawings why the
nineteenth century is sometimes know as the Century of the Top Hat. Men
wore top hats for business, pleasure and formal occasions - pearl gray
for daytime, black for day or night. The historian James Laver once made
the observation that an assemblage of toppers looked like factory
chimney’s and thus added to the mood of the industrial era. The height
and contour of the hat fluctuated with the decades. In England, post-Brummel
dandies went in for flared crowns and swooping brims. Their counterparts
in France, known as the Incroyables, wore top hats of such outlandish
dimensions that there was no room for them in overcrowded cloakrooms
until Antoine Gibus came along in 1823 and invented the collapsible
opera hat. Later on, the American financier J. P. Morgan approached the
same problem from another angle; he ordered a limousine with an
especially high roof so he could ride around without taking his hat off.
A milestone of a different sort was achieved in 1814 by a French
magician named Louis Comte; he became the first conjurer on record to
pull a white rabbit out of a top hat.
By the time Sargent painted Ribblesdale’s portrait in 1902, the top
hat was actually nearing the end of its century-long primacy, soon to be
replaced by the more compact homburg. In short order, the top hat
settled into the status it has today - that of a costume prop, a
graceful anachronism worn with white tie, tails and gloves on only the
rarest of formal ceremonies.
The top hat is a piece of history now, not really a part of the
contemporary wardrobe despite its occasional uses. For a while, back in
the 1930s and 1940s, Europeans got the false impression that it was
making a comeback in American. They’d been watching Fred Astaire
movies and simply assumed that all American men were dressing the way he
did. Astaire wore top hats in a dozen or more films (notably Top Hat, in
1935). In fact, I’d have to say that after Lord Ribblesdale, Astaire
was one of the most accomplished top hat wearers of all time. He wore
the hat tilted, of course - at a jaunty, almost rakish angle. Emily Post
would not have approved.
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