Michael Quinion on The Naming of Hats

[Warbaby]

This interesting article on the naming of hats was on today's edition of the World Wide Words email list.



WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 741 Saturday 18 June 2011
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Author/editor: Michael Quinion US advisory editor: Julane Marx
Website: http://www.worldwidewords.org ISSN 1470-1448
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"Because of declining sales, in 1965 the British Hat Council felt it
necessary to create an advertising slogan, "get ahead, get a hat".
Earlier generations would have found the advice otiose, since only
the meanest members of society went about without one. Photographs
from the early to middle twentieth century immediately strike us
because of all the hats, whether it's a sea of flat caps at a
football match, a horde of be-bowlered city clerks crossing London
Bridge on their way to work, a group of heavily-hatted women
enjoying a walk in the park, or any man in an old black-and-white
film, whose head is invariably topped off with a Homburg, trilby,
fedora, or other style.

The soft hat called a Homburg came from the exclusive German spa
town of Bad Homburg near Frankfurt, often frequented by royalty in
late Victorian times. The hat became fashionable in London because
the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) regularly visited the town
from 1882 onwards, liked the style of the local hat and brought it
home with him (in 1893, advertisers in American newspapers were
calling it "the latest fad", though they spelt it "Homberg"). The
name was also early on confusingly given to a woman's hat of rather
different style that was also known as the Brighton hat:

The woman who started the fashion of the Brighton or
Homburg hat has much to answer for. She has robbed
thousands of Englishwomen of their character - so far as
character is represented by headgear. Had Dame Nature
foreseen the Homburg hat craze she would not doubt have
been accommodating enough to construct all women's faces
after the same pattern with the oblong mask, classic
features, and shapely head required for the severity of
such a style of headgear.
[Manchester Times, 5 Jun. 1891.]

The male style could be variously black, grey or and brown. In the
1930s the black hat became known as the Anthony Eden, or the Eden
hat, after the then British Foreign Secretary, who commonly wore
one.

The other two of the three classic styles of men's headwear of the
period were popularised by actresses. The fedora, later to be the
classic topping of the Italian-American mobster, was named after
the title and main character in a famous play by the French
playwright Victorien Sardou, first performed in 1882 with Sarah
Bernhardt as the hat-wearing Russian princess Fédora Romanov. The
name of the trilby comes from a play adapted by the American Paul
Potter from a book by George du Maurier. The latter had been an
immense hit when it came out in 1894:

We are beset by a veritable epidemic of Trilby fads.
Trilby bonnets and gowns and shoes, Trilby accents of
speech and Trilby poses of person. Trilby tableaux, teas
and dances. Trilby ice cream and Trilby sermons, Trilby
clubs and reading classes and prize examinations, Trilby
nomenclature for everybody and everything.
[New York Tribune, Mar. 1895. A Trilby ice cream was
so called because it was moulded into the shape of the
hat.]

The play was brought to London in November 1895 by the impresario
Beerbohm Tree and was a huge success, ensuring that the hat worn by
the bare-footed, chain-smoking, 20-year-old leading lady Dorothea
Baird would become part of the British trilby craze. Her picture,
wearing that hat, appeared on postcards, in advertisements, on
chocolate boxes, and in newspapers.

Women's hats of the period also had names with literary links. The
Dolly Varden was large, with one side bent down, "abundantly
trimmed with flowers" as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it. The
name came from the coquettish character in Charles Dickens's
Barnaby Rudge, though her hat, as described by Dickens, was more
modest:

... a little straw hat trimmed with cherry-coloured
ribbons, and worn the merely trifle on one side - just
enough in short to make it the wickedest and most
provoking head-dress that ever malicious milliner
devised.

The sale of William Frith's portrait of Dolly Varden at the auction
of Dickens's effects in June 1870, shortly after the author's
death, stimulated a fashion in the UK and the US for the
eighteenth-century costume it portrayed, particularly among younger
and middle-class women. Such was Dolly's popularity that her name
was soon applied to a parasol, a racehorse, two American species of
fish, a mine in Nevada and a cake, as well as the hat. To judge
from these comments, however, the fashion was not universally
popular in America:

The maids of Athens, and the matrons too, do not take
to Dolly Vardens worth a cent.
[Athens Messenger (Ohio), 16 May 1872.]


Was ever any new costume more criticized than the new
"Dolly Varden"?
[Harper's Weekly, May 1872.]

Another a little later was the merry widow, an ornate and wide-
brimmed hat whose style and name derived from the hat worn by Lily
Elsie in the London premiere of Franz Lehar's operetta in June
1907. The show made Ms Elsie a star and the focus of a craze, just
as happened with Dorothea Baird a decade earlier. Her picture -
wearing that hat - appeared very widely in advertisements and
picture postcards. The style was as common in the US as in Britain,
resulting in this puzzled comment:

There you will see women wearing "Merry Widow" hats
who are not widows but spinsters, or married women whose
husbands are very much alive, and the hats in many cases
are as large as three feet in diameter.
[America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental
Diplomat, by Wu Tingfang, 1914.]

He was right about their size. Some American examples became so
large, in fact, that a picture postcard of the time featured a
wearer staring sadly at a sign:

Ladies with Merry Widow Hats Take Freight Elevator.

Another style, popularized by the Prince of Wales in 1896, was the
boater, a straw hat with a flat crown and brim, so named because it
became the usual informal wear when messing about in boats, but now
remembered by many people mostly as part of the official costume of
their local butcher, not least Corporal "They don't like it up 'em"
Jones of the BBC television series Dad's Army."

(continued in next post)

 

[Warbaby]

The naming of hats continues:


"The formal men's hat of the nineteenth century was the top hat, an
updated version of a hat of earlier centuries that had been faced
with beaver fur, though by the 1830s silk ones had become standard.
Tall and round, with the brim curling at the sides, it's familiar
still in very formal wear and from costume dramas. Colloquially in
Britain it was a topper; in the US a plug-hat, perhaps because the
head fitted it like a plug in a pipe. An older version was called
the bell-topper, beltopper, or belltopper because it had a bell-
shaped crown.

Gentlepeople, whether in town or country, dress almost
exactly as they do in England, except that the beltopper
hat is comparatively seldom seen.
[New Zealand After Fifty Years, by Edward Wakefield,
1889.]

Another slangy British term for the taller varieties of top hat was
chimney-pot hat (stove-pipe hat in the US):

His first half-hour is occupied in trying to decide
whether to wear his light suit with a cane and drab
billycock, or his black tails with a chimney-pot hat and
his new umbrella.
[Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, by Jerome K Jerome,
1886.]

The wide-awake was a soft felt hat with a broad brim and a low
crown, said to have been jocularly named because it had no nap.
It's mentioned in Robert Baden-Powell's 1908 book Scouting for Boys
and also here:

And lastly there was the wagoner himself, a lad, say,
of eighteen summers, a fine, strong, healthy-looking
young fellow, well clad, and wearing on his head a
'raddidoo' or wide-awake hat, with perhaps a peacock's
feather or some other embellishment at the side.
[The British Workman Past and Present, by The Reverend
M C F Morris, 1928. "Raddidoo" defeats me completely, as
it did the author, who remarked it was "used in the East
Riding for the ordinary wide-awake hat commonly worn by
the farm lads. The origin of this curious word I have
never been able to discover".]

The billycock was a hard, round hat. Etymologically, it has been a
matter of contention, with many references saying firmly that it's
from the name of William Coke of Norfolk, who commissioned its
manufacture (so billy-coke or billy-cock, though his family name
was actually pronounced "cook"). Not so. The name is actually from
a style of the early eighteenth century called a bully-cock. The
original bullies were upper-class sporting gangs of the period, who
became a terror on the streets and gave their name to intimidating
the vulnerable. (There's another level of word-historical curiosity
here, since bully is from Dutch "boele", a lover, and was at first
a term of endearment applied to either sex. Later it became a way
to address a male friend, hence the name for the group.) A bully-
cock was a bully's hat whose brim was cockedor turned up. This is a
description of an Oxford "smart" of the early eighteenth century:

When he walks the streets he is easily distinguished
by a stiff silk gown, which rustles in the wind, as he
struts along; a flaxen tie-wig; a broad bully-cock'd hat,
or a square cap of about twice the usual size; white
stockings; thin Spanish leather shoes; his cloaths lined
with tawdry silk, and his shirt ruffled down the bosom as
well as at the wrists.
[Quoted in Heraldic Anomalies: or Rank Confusion in
our Orders of Precedence, by Edward Nares, 1823. A
"square cap", or "square", is the academic headgear later
referred to slangily as a mortarboard.]

William Coke was responsible for a very similar hat to the
billycock, which is part of the reason for the confusion. But his
was what we now call the bowler. The hatters Lock of London created
it for him in 1850 to protect the heads of his gamekeepers when
chasing poachers. It was made from felt rendered hard with shellac.
Mr Coke reputedly tested the prototype by jumping on it, an abuse
it survived undented. It ought to be called a Coke hat, which
indeed it was for a while, or perhaps a Lock hat. But Messrs Lock
had it manufactured by the firm of Thomas and William Bowler and
their name has stuck to it, no doubt because a hat with a crown
like a bowl ought to be called a bowler. In the US, the usual name
was and is derby, after the Epsom Derby (though pronounced
differently), partly because of its riding associations, but mainly
because the hat had by the latter part of the century become
standard wear for the Londoners for whom Derby Day was a de facto
public holiday.

A cocked hat was any kind that had the brim permanently turned up.
These had been in fashion in the eighteenth century, especially the
three-cornered hat worn both by civilians and by army and navy
officers. In the nineteenth century, only after it had gone out of
fashion in favour of the beaver hat, this came to be called a
tricorn or tricorne hat. Towards the end of the eighteenth century
a type cocked only at front and back became common. By analogy,
modern fashion historians call this a bicorne, though likewise the
term doesn't seem to have been used by its wearers. Naval officers
kept the bicorne, though around the time of Nelson they turned it
ninety degrees to point front and back instead of side to side."

 

[Lefty]

Good stuff.
A quick search for the wide-awake took me to the Bollman site, which provides for a different style and definition.

Bollman Hat Company digs deep into the annals of its history to capture and commemorate this long forgotten style. The Wide Awake hat was inspired by the paramilitary campaign organization of the 1860s. The Wide Awakes, affiliated with the Republican Party during the 1860 election, supported Abraham Lincoln and the Union while strongly opposing slavery.

The Wide Awakes were well-drilled and served as political police in escorting party speakers and in preserving order at party demonstrations and had over 400,000 estimated members. The standard Wide Awake uniform consisted of a full robe or cape, a torch, and of course the black hat for which we pay tribute. The Bollman Hat Company produced this hat and all of their hats in black only when George Bollman and Isaac Sowers first opened their hat factory in Adamstown, Pennsylvania in 1868.



but then...
1860s

John Butterfield of the Butterfield Overland Mail left his mark on the West's clothing, as well as transportation with his usual attire, copied by many others in the stage industry - a long yellow linen duster, high leather boots, and a flat "wide-awake" hat.

 

[rlk]

Dorothea Baird as Trilby (London 1895)

Still find no contemporary references or images to the hats worn by the title Fedora or Trilby characters in their plays.

examples:

 

[KILO NOVEMBER]

T.S. Eliot had something to say on this ...

The Naming of Hats is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a hat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.

-- apologies to Mr. Eliot

 

[Cliffnopus]

I call mine "Fred"

Cliff