"COOL CHAPEAU, MAN"
Epstein, Joseph
Casual COOL CHAPEAU, MAN Earlier this summer, I was discovered to have a basal carcinoma, which sounds terrifying, but is in fact merely a precancerous sore that was easily cut away by a...
...blocking was a mysterious steaming process that gave new life to a man’s hat...
...So far no one has called me “natty...
...Not even baseball players look good in them—just as no Greek fisherman has ever looked good in a Greek fi sherman’s cap...
...A noir fl ick is unthinkable without fedoras...
...One thinks of FDR as, characteristically, wearing a hat and brandishing a cigarette holder...
...The hat I bought, at a shop too quaintly called The Things We Love, is a straw fedora, with a slender black ribbon running round its base...
...and was the result of too much sun...
...I have long owned a green felt fedora that I intend to bring out and wear in the autumn...
...When I pass people I know, I am not above tipping my hat, or before women taking it off in a sweeping gesture as if it had a plume...
...I intend nonetheless to persist...
...I shall not, for example, be able to travel on an airplane with a hat, unless I sit with it in my lap through the fl ight, for surely there will be no room for it in the invariably crowded overhead luggage compartments...
...Very dapper” is the most frequent comment...
...I suspect that most people who see me approaching from the middle distance ask themselves, “Is this guy in the hat kidding or what...
...In my thus far brief return to wearing a serious hat, I discover that doing so entails certain inconveniences...
...Men of my father’s generation wouldn’t leave the house without their hats...
...With his thick head of hair, low-hairline division, a hat probably would not have sat well on Kennedy...
...Hat shops were a fairly common feature in the cityscape...
...I may well become known, at least in my neighborhood, as the guy in those strange old-fashioned hats...
...In his baseball cap, the pitcher Randy Johnson, the Big Unit, looks like a 6'10...
...The reason my hat seems to be garnering so much attention is that it is unusual today to see a man wearing a—how shall I put it?—grown-up hat in a serious way...
...Hat racks, too, are less and less common...
...Yet the baseball cap is endemic in our day, worn forward, backward, or off the side, rapper style...
...John McCain is often shown on television walking around Iraq in a baseball hat...
...But today there is no politician that one automatically thinks of in a hat...
...Anywhere you wear them, though, they don’t come off...
...The sore was at my hairline—wasn’t it William James who said of Josiah Royce that he showed “an indecent exposure of forehead...
...Dapper I can live with, but natty suggests two-colored shoes and monogrammed shirts...
...Nice hat,” more than one passing stranger has said to me...
...I was told to begin using sunscreen and, on sunny days, to wear a hat...
...Many dry cleaners and shoeshine parlors also blocked hats...
...An adult hat, I call it, and I wear it at an only slightly rakish angle...
...Cool chapeau, man,” I’ve also heard...
...John F. Kennedy is often cited as the man who killed men’s hats in America, and perhaps around the world...
...geek...
...JOSEPH EPSTEIN...
...Hats also present a problem in restaurants, for the vast majority of even good restaurants no longer have a hat-check facility...
...With his cap off, he’s more than passable...
...Barack Obama, the youth candidate, I can easily envision wearing a baseball cap backwards...
...The brim is of normal size, and it is a fairly serious piece of goods: no Aussie Outback hat or Indiana Jones replica...
...The baseball cap marks a steep decline in elegant male attire...
...McCain doesn’t look good in the damn thing...
...Casual COOL CHAPEAU, MAN Earlier this summer, I was discovered to have a basal carcinoma, which sounds terrifying, but is in fact merely a precancerous sore that was easily cut away by a dermatologist...
...Euclid, unfortunately, does not take up rakish angles, a small fl aw in one of the great books in Western civilization...
...Harry Truman—a haberdasher, after all—also comes most readily to mind behatted...
...As a surety of my earnestness, I do my best not to smile as I pass...
...The infrastructure, as we should say today, for serious hats is no longer in place...
...The press this hat has been bringing me all summer is noteworthy...
...The picture makes me, in one swoop, lose hope and want to fi ght hard against change...
...In the movies, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, James Cagney punched thugs out without removing their hats...
...For the candidate who is supposed to represent gravity and the wisdom of experience, a baseball cap, even one with Navy written across it, is all wrong...
...A mistake, this, I feel...
...You don’t ever want to be natty—at least I don’t...
...I shall instead think of myself as among the last men attempting to pass themselves off as grown-ups in America...
Vol. 13 • September 2008 • No. 48
