Style and whimsy: the signatures of a Stephen Jones hat

It’s been too long since I posted but it doesn’t mean I haven’t been looking at your heads to see what you’re wearing. I’ve been wearing a flat cap made from a hessian sack of basil, at least that’s what it pretends to be. Anyway, I like it and I bought it on my honeymoon as a wedding present to myself so it reminds me of that. Everyone else seems to be wearing little straw trilbies so fashion’s not changing in that regard.

The major news, however, is what I see from my Weekend Herald:  Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones will be in Brisbane between 27 March and 27 June at the Queensland Art Gallery (media release).

I saw the exhibition in London and loved it so go, go, go if you can. I shall be doing my best to get there and I’m working on meeting the man himself, who is here to wish the exhibition well on what is the beginning of a six month voyage around the world. (I’m producing audio travel features for an airline and this would make a great feature for Brisbane.)

If I do get to meet the great milliner, probably I won’t mention that I tried to knock off his fez using a Turkish woman from Etsy.

Before the exhibition opens at the end of March, you can be part of its progress by looking at QAG’s Flickr stream.

Protester wearing a bowler hat (a derby) as part of a shorthand for fat cat bankers.

I’ve been exploring a new business offering (at first) self-guided audio walking tours of Sydney (your feedback very welcome!), which has kept me from posting here. Bill’s nice comment on an earlier post and Rosie calling to see if I’m still alive have spurred me to post again, something especially easy to do as the Sydney Morning Herald ran a picture today that hits my favourite theme: hats as a shorthand for character.

The man in the picture is parodying a fat cat financier as part of a protest calling on G20 leaders to cut executive bonuses. The outfit might have worked without the bowler hat (or derby for my US readers) but with the hat we are in no doubt that this man is a banker and a successful one. All this despite bowler hats having been out of fashion for decades but so powerful is the image of the hat that it simply won’t go away. Although this man has probably never seen anyone of any profession wearing a bowler hat, it would have taken him all of a nonosecond to pick the bowler hat as his metonym.

Don’t forget you can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes and never miss an episode…

Rosie Boylan, Damian Damjanovski, and Robert Carroll trying on hats at Strand Hatters in Sydney

It’s not enough to like a hat, the hat has to like you, too. There’s more to consider than hat size and shape, as you can hear in this podcast when headwear specialist Rosie Boylan and hat shop manager Robert Carroll work with model Damian Damjanovski to find the right hat. They consider Damian’s headshape, face, weight, colouring, personality, clothing preferences, age, and where he wants to wear the hat.

The podcast shows clearly the benefits of shopping somewhere that specialises in hats and can advise you.

Thanks to all at Strand Hatters in Sydney for their hospitality, expertise and willingness to let us use their stock for this podcast.

Keep refridgerated after wearing: a hat made from London broil

Via FHM’s “Office obsessions” column for June I found Hats of Meat, a website with pictures of exactly that: hats made from meat. What can I say? It’s a wide, strange world, people.

Desmond rummages through his collection of 250,000 titles to share some good tunes, some unexpected ones and a few you may have never heard before. This week’s theme is hats.

The BBC offers music shows for a week only as a stream (not a podcast) on its iPlayer so listen while you can.

Desmond Carrington's hat-themed playlist on BBC Radio 2

It’s a venerable selection, which is probably to be expected given the subject matter and the presenter. Time for some top 40 artists to sharpen their pencils and write about the accessory that so often gives them their personality. See, for instance, the number of Tweets to Matt Giraud that mention his fedora.

HT to Kathryn Hellewell for the link via Twitter.

Juana Atkins from Cadlow Trading rocks a bedazzled beret

It’s easy to think that hat sellers are a dying breed because hats are like that thing in the supermarket you don’t notice they sell till you’re looking for it. I came across Cadlow, an online clothing store from New Zealand, through owner Juana Atkins’ Twittering about fedoras.

I asked her how she came to sell hats in her online store. She said she hadn’t thought much about hats or selling them till her eye was caught by “a couple of unusual ones” at a gift fair. Knowing that her teenaged son loved hats, she put in a small order, thinking perhaps that if he did, others would.

Now she has a limited but popular range in which black wool felt fedoras are the hot sellers. The range is growing, with the addition of two fedoras imported from America, one houndstooth and the other a black corduroy. She says trilbies don’t sell as well, unless the have a really good pattern.

New Zealand merino wool cheesecutter (flat cap)

Although the hot sellers are imported, there are Kiwi-made hats in the collection, too: New Zealand merino wool cheesecutters. They sell well but Juana wouldn’t have sourced if a customer hadn’t asked for them, further showing how rewarding a good relationship with an attentive hat seller can be. I can only imagine they’re very warm and would buy one, myself, if I didn’t have a similar Kangol already.

Other customer requests have been for bigger sizes, leading Juana to conclude, “There must be a lot of Kiwi men with big heads because they sell week in and week out.”

The 61 cm fedora is the most popular, which tells me I should move to New Zealand as that’s my size and it’s large enough to be hard to find in some styles. Trying buying a vintage hat on eBay even close to 61 cm.

In terms of trends, Cadlow’s sales show the smaller brimmed (not stingy) fedora has the lead on the wider brim. Winter (it’s winter in this half of the globe) has been great for sales of wool felt fedoras.

One of Cadlow’s best features is its 14-day returns policy (refund or change size), something bound to appeal to first-time hat buyers not sure of their size, although the site includes advice on how to measure head size.

Almost all Cadlow’s sales are within New Zealand, proving they have great taste in the land of the long white cloud. And sales are increasing, particularly among 20-something men.

“Now that I sell hats I am always looking out for them,” says Juana. “NZ men are still pretty conservative. Colourwise for hats, black is number one followed by grey and quite a way behind grey is brown. Anything with colour on it seems to have a very limited market unless it is a really cool retro print in murky greens and browns and orange.

“I found a hat like that that sold out in weeks. I went to reorder only to find out that they had no more and wouldn’t be ordering in any more from overseas as they changed their patterns every year.”

For any hatmakers reading, Juana has a plea “Retro is big and anyone who can make a wool felt fedora with a really cool retro-patterned hat band will have me knocking on their door begging them to wholesale them to me.”

Anyone who, like me, suffers from a cold head should check out those cheesecutters.

You’ll find Cadlow Trading and Juana at www.cadlow.co.nz

In The Reach of a Chef: Beyond the Kitchen, author Michael Ruhlman mentions a sociologist attached to the Culinary Institute of America who was  working on a theory that all religion exists to control the sexuality of women. That religion could rear its head so vividly even in a book about something as secular as American cooking is a reminder that religion is pervasive in a way we can sometimes forget. This is particularly true of women in religion.

The hijab has hardly been out of the news for years.  Men’s headwear outside the mainstream (baseball caps) confronts in a unique way for an item of clothing; but it has nothing on the storms that circle over women’s heads. Men’s religious headwear seldom raises much more than a murmur. Sikhs, for instance, are catered for by even in many uniformed professions around the world. (Where they are not, it seems to be mostly around safety concerns — turbans not stopping bullets as well as helmets).

Right and wrong?

In the west, nuns escape scrutiny with barely a wimple (ho, ho); meanwhile, teenaged Asian muslim girls are having to lobby for changes in basketball rules to allow them to wear their hijabs.

How can we decide that muslim women in the west are forced to wear the hijab? We can legislate against abuse, we can legislate that everyone should have the freedom to choose what they wear, but what constitutes “forced” when there is no overt compulsion? As one journalist for France Soir put it, who’s to say that “wearing a thong”, or other uncomfortable lingerie, isn’t a free choice for French women but “an example of bowing to men’s deisres”. Or, back to religious compulsion, are Jews (and muslims) unacceptably prevented from eating pork because it is forbidden by their leaders?

But what French president Nicolas Sarkozy has come out against is the niqab (full veil), which I think is a different matter. Sarkozy told the French parliament that face coverings threatened the republic’s secular values and sexual equality.

Those are not the arguments to me. Sexual equality is already protected: provided a woman makes the choice herself, she should have the liberté to wear a veil. The question of choice needs to be decided on individual cases, not a blanket assertion that every woman who wears a niqab has been forced to do so.

I am also squarely behind secular values but there must be tolerance: is a veil more offensively religious than a Jesus fish on a car, a shtreimel, or a steeple towering over a neighbourhood? If religious attire threatens secular values then surely so do religious symbols and, even more so, buildings. This is something Sarkozy would need to take  up with the Pope also, not just the tiny minority of niqabi.

The question to me is around the freedoms of those of us not wearing a veil. More than half of human communication involves body language, much of it in the face. It is confronting, even frightening, to try to communicate with a mask, hence the place of hockey and other masks in films like Friday 13th, Scream and Silence of the Lambs. Humans are animals and many of our responses are hardwired. We know, for instance, that a person’s blood pressure will rise if they’re seated with their back to a door — because they can’t see possible danger approaching. Similarly, we scan faces for aggression and signs of danger. You can’t do that if the face is covered.

The other day I took a flyer from a man on the street wearing a mask with a smile on it. I took the flyer because the man smiled at me. It wasn’t until I’d gone a few steps past that I realised he hadn’t smiled: I had responsed to the mask and I had no idea of the real emotion behind it. Our interaction was unequal and false.

Senior judges in the UK have said full veils should not be worn in court. Judges have to assess the credibility of witnesses. How can that be done behind a veil? Jack Straw, a British MP, currently Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, asks female constituents to remove their veil when visiting his surgery. He spoke to the BBC about the impact he thought veils could have in a society where watching facial expressions was important for contact between different people.

“What I’ve been struck by when I’ve been talking to some of the ladies concerned is that they had not, I think, been fully aware of the potential in terms of community relations,” he said. “I mean, they’d thought of it just as a statement for themselves.” — Jack Straw, MP.

I, too, feel that’s something that must be borne in mind by those who exercise a freedom to wear the veil. Their choice affects others and those others should have an equal freedom, a freedom to decline to interact with those who are not openly communicating with them because they are masked.

If we are respecting choice, we must at best give as much weight to secular choices as to religious ones.

The bespoke knitted fez I commissioned through Etsy

It’s not every day you get a card inviting you to the post office to pick up a handmade knitted fez from Turkey but yesterday was one of those days for me.

The idea for a knitted fez was not mine, it was Stephen Jones’: the London-based milliner’s current collection includes just such an thing. The whimsy he brings to men’s hats appeals to me and I wanted his fez beanie. Because you can’t buy the Jonesboy label in Australia, this seemed a good excuse to experiment with Etsy the first time.

Etsy is simple so it took only minutes to put up a picture of the Jonesboy hat and a concise request in the Alchemy section (the customer area):

“I would like a hat like the one pictured and an idea of the price. I have a number of wool hats but like this one and would get one if it’s not outrageously priced.”

Within an hour I had received bids from a couple of sellers, the beginning of an exchange of messages that Etsy calls a conversation (your inbox is referred to as your “conversations”, the mailbot is the convobot and so on). The messages give you a chance to ask more questions of the prospective maker or cut to the chase, accepting or rejecting the bid.

In all, I had 11 bids in 24 hours. I grouped them into a spreadsheet with columns for the cost (making + postage), estimated completion date, the maker’s feedback score from other sales, and the location. The total cost of each bid ranged from USD10 (Lithuania) to USD53 (Germany), with bids coming in also from the US, Canada, Turkey and the UK.

Price was not the most important consideration, although it did knock out the $10 bid from Lithuania. I found the sellers I considered seriously  were the ones who were most descriptive, confident and pleasant in their responses.

“I can make you that hat” just didn’t instill trust the way, say, this did:

“Knitted wool hat similar to the photograph, in good quality double knitting yarn (Wendy Mode – 50% merino, 50% acrylic). Colour dark red with black tassle. Note: The hat will be knitted by hand, not machine. It will be knitted on four needles, and therefore seamless. If you wish to save money I can use a 100% acrylic yarn which is cheaper, just convo me. Ditto I can get 100% wool but it will be more expensive.”

Sure, I only understand about half of what she was saying but what mattered was that she obviously knew her onions. And I liked the style of her from her Etsy profile: “Please don’t insult us both by expecting me to work for less than you’d pay in Primark. Anything I sell here has been made by a grown woman in Yorkshire, not a 9yo in the 3rd world, and my overheads are higher LOL!”

But blueskiesuk was not the maker I went with in the end.

For my first Etsy experience I decided to go for the middle of the price range ($39) and a maker from Turkey who promised, “No matter to make a hat as this fez. I know the original fez’s shape and I can make it as close as a twin.”

Blueskiesuk had come in at $51 ($61, if I went with pure merino wool). For my first Etsy experiment I wanted to see what quality I could get in the middle cost range from a supplier who still had great feedback. I thought it would tell me more than going straight for the most expensive supplier, even if I did suspect she was the most expensive for a reason. If BouquetSpecialDesign hadn’t sounded confident and wasn’t located in the home of the fez, I might have canned the experiment side and gone straight for blueskiesuk.

Communication during the process was great. Shortly after commissioning the fez, I had a message on Etsy from BouquetSpecialDesign with a picture of the wool, “This wool’s colour is called in Turkish as “Fez’s Red” . This red colour is special to fez.” And then, about a day later, I got a picture of the finished product and, I have to admit, my heart sank a little.

The Jonesboy hat is a beanie with fez characteristics, a nod at the fez, if you will. The hat from BouquetSpecialDesign is a fez with a nod at the beanie — it’s wool. I can’t fault the workmanship: it’s warm, soft, comfortable and most definitely a knitted fez but it isn’t the “twin” of Stephen Jone’s whimsical winter fez. It’s tall and unsophisticated, too high to be worn without pulling it down on itself, making a lip. In short, it won’t be leaving the house, not on my head; although I do look quite the picture on the sofa watching MasterChef.

I think perhaps it’s time for a conversation with Blueskiesuk…

Twins?

Ruben Guthrie (Toby Schmitz), a young creative director for an advertising agenc

Last night I went to see Brendan Cowell’s entertaining but overly-simple play about alchoholic advertising executive Ruben Guthrie.

I wrote in an earlier post (Hats as a shorthand for character) that I’d picked up the postcard advertising the show because of the picture of the young man in the top hat. I doubted the top hat would feature in the show and, having seen it now, I can confirm that it doesn’t (nor does the scarf).

It confirms what we already know:  different types of hats are imbued with  meaning and values. Your choice of hat is telegraphing something to other people because of associations already concieved. The interesting question is What? What associations, stereotypes and pre-conceptions are associated with what type of hat? For instance, Cowell himself was in the audience last night wearing a patchwork tweed bucket hat that said to me “I’m creative, confident and slightly unusual”.)

This is something I’d like to explore, probably in an instalment of the Open Crown podcast, and I’d love your views on different hat types and how they’re perceived: What is an onlooker going to conclude (rightly or wrongly) about the wearer of a particular type of hat?