Bespoke Suit Matches Hat (3)

The aforementioned correctness isn’t to do with a dusty old rule, nor the dictat of some style sage but simply to do with the way the object appears; I wear driving and Gatsby caps a little to the side but I vary how much of my forehead I reveal depending on style. I think a slightly downward pointing peak on a flat cap looks more rakishly metropolitan, whereas a more upward pointing peak on a Gatsby, accompanied with a smile looks easy-going and bucolic – echoing a setting sun across a golden meadow.


As minute as some might think these differences are out of context, in an outfit they can make all the difference.

If you watch certain film noir, there are characters who have a style of wearing trilbies and fedoras that is seen little nowadays; some fedoras are pushed back on the head with the brim pulled down over the eyes; some trilbies are worn jauntily, a la Mr Sinatra, revealing more of one side of the face than another; a few pinched hats are snap-brimmed with the characteristic flick up at the back brim and the downward pointing front brim. Rarely, in such pictures, are they worn without any consideration for the aesthetic of wearing a hat. For a hat, properly worn, is not an object merely to be secured to the temple, parallel to the brow; it is as much a stylistic expression as a stuffed pocket square, four-in-hand or a Club collar. When you try a hat on, be bold – express, be theatrical, try to frame yourself with the item; wearing a hat properly, as Frans Hals understood, is worthy of art.


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