By Leo Aliev
“Our crowns have been bought and paid for — all we have to do is wear them.”
– James Baldwin
Min Jin Lee opens with this aphorism as her epigraph in her debut 2007 novel “Free Food For Millionaires.” The book centres Casey Han, a woman with “a refined diction”, freshly graduated from Princeton with a degree in economics. She — the daughter of working-class Korean immigrants, enters corporate New York of the 90s with a yearning for glamour. She strolls through malls, maxing out her credit cards, buying thousand-dollar suits for a lifestyle she cannot afford. The odd evening when she isn’t working to cover her debts, she attends millinery class. It is an unconventional hobby. “Most women did not wear hats anymore for decorative purposes”. Her hats are the epitome of the opulence she so desperately exerts.
In my hometown of Chernogolovka, you may see a babushka or two wearing a Pavlov Posad headscarf, but they seem rarer now. Perhaps because the town was founded during the Soviet Union so folk culture was never really there in the first place. But the Soviet-era headscarves women widely wore are nowhere to be seen either. The most headwear you see now is an ushanka in the winter — a practical item. Heads seem to be exposed in the months that aren’t the notoriously harsh winter.
Around the corner at my local pub in Kilburn, I often see a man dressed head to toe in Edwardian garments, top hat included. He has a cane and a pocket watch, almost convincing one of the possibilities of time travel until you look a little closer and see the slightly uncomfortable fit to the whole look. It’s all a bit tight. But the top hat is adequately tall — springing to memory the Madhatter, only substituting tea for Guinness. Yet his outfit feels like a film character costume. Perhaps this is because he doesn’t call to mind a real archetype that exists today.
Contrast him to a man wearing a navy quarter zip or a quilted vest — you might immediately place this person in a category (or perhaps in the Gherkin). He knows what his place is in the modern world. The quarter zip acts as a portal to his identity, but the top hat of that man at the pub calls to a past, revealing nothing about the present. We have lost the intricacies of this once-prevalent identity, turning the hat from portal to shield.
There is a sort of nostalgia that brings all these cases together. Casey Han, the babushkas slowly strolling towards the bazaar, the Edwardian man at the pub that smells like lager and foreclosure. A sort of hope — only pointed backwards. Seeing people in hats seems out of place. The indulgence in various headwear now is reserved to royals, eccentrics and the religious.
We have mostly shed our hats.
In 1920s Piccadilly Circus you would find young boys wearing flat caps, city dwellers in bowlers, perhaps some modern gentlemen in fedoras. Hats were so popular that legislation had to be passed in both the US and the UK in the form of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and Importation of Plumage (Prohibition) Act of 1921 to prevent the hunting birds from dozens of species for their feathers to be used in the millinery trade. It was the first highly profitable business to be predominantly owned and operated, in large, by women. It provided stable and respectable employment and by 1900, etiquette dictated that a respectable women could not leave the house without a hat. It was ingrained. Men too, always wore hats, from the aristocracy to chimney boys. The value of these objects was unquestionable, intrinsic, presupposed.
Hats were things.
So where did they go?
A total absence of headwear today would be an overstatement. After all, there are still caps to keep to sun out and beanies or earmuffs for when it’s cold. We have hair bands too, to avoid any disruption to our jogging. But there is something different here. Hats are not just worn. They are worn for something. They are not status signifiers — Jeff Bezos wears the same cap everyone else does. Nor are they necessarily determinants of our identity as we saw with the Edwardian Madhatter at my local pub. No, today’s hats act as alleviation — a vessel to a feeling of comfort. They are purely practical items. They have no essence of their own.
Byung Chul Han, a philosopher teaching at Berlin University of the Arts, argues that in today’s achievement society, contrasted to the disciplinary society of the past, living is “boiled down to its vital functions.” That we have become consumers of things, rather than users. Hence, our surroundings have become full of non-things. For Han, endurance, lingering and self-sameness is what defines an object. A smartphone is the purest example of a non-thing. Something that “demands our constant attention” showing us an unending “succession of bits” is “anything but self-same.”
In an even more extreme version of our world, there would be no things in the way Hannah Arendt describes them as artefacts “stabilising human life.” For her, people
“have become masters in the art of being happy among ‘small things,’ … extending to these things a care and tenderness which, in a world where rapid industrialisation constantly kills off the things of yesterday to produce today’s objects, may even appear to be the world’s last, purely humane corner.”
In a post-thing world, hats, or for that matter crowns, have no place. They do not serve a function, and they must make way for the next bit of plastic you don’t need.
So, when the sun isn’t shining in your face and your ears aren’t too cold, why wear a hat?
