K.D. Lightner said:
riccardo said:
K.D. Lightner said:
K.D. Lightner said:
Matt Deckard said:
jamespowers said:
[The really scary part is the bums weren't bums. I'm sure a lot of those men in the soup line were wearing the same clothes they wore at work before the jobs evaporated.
That's one thing I hope stays in the past./HTML]
Hear, Hear. Without getting political, I am praying that the various bailout initiatives and thought processes by our business and political leaders work the way they are supposed to.jamespowers said:Fedoras were indeed the everyman hat. A banker might have worn a homburg and a business tycoon might have worn a tophat but all of them wore a fedora at one time or another.
You have to remember that all of these hats originated as "work" hats. The bowler originated as a gamekeepers hat. He wore it when he was running after poachers and it protected his head from low lying branches and brush. The same is true for the tophat and homburg. The tophat was sort of a crash helmet of its time. One would use it because the common belief that they would rather crush their hat in a fall from a horse than their skull.
The tophat, bowler and Homburg were much stiffer at their inception. The first bowlers were ordered from the Locke brothers with the stipulation that an average sized man could stand on it without crushing it!
The fedora was always a soft felt hat from 1868 on. Its popularity rose and fell over the years but the first world war made it much more popular than it ever had been before. This was due to a shortage of the flakes used to make stiffener. In those days it was derived from a South American beetle. The shortage caused a shortage in the production of new stiff hats and the fedora took its place as the everyman hat.
Regards to all,
J
