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When you picture Laurel and Hardy, Charlie
Chaplin, a Rene Magritte work of art, the four
major characters in Samuel Beckett's "Waiting
for Godot", or a well dressed British banker, a
bowler hat, known also as a derby, almost
certainly comes to mind. The bowler, perhaps
like no other hat before or since, stands
unambiguously as a symbol for an age, a
passage in western civilization.
The bowler hat was created in 1850 for an
English game warden, James Coke. It was
intended as a riding hat that Mr. Coke could
count on for hard hat protection as he rode his
steed through his protectorate looking out for
poachers. It soon became, as Fred Miller
Robinson wrote in The Man in the Bowler Hat:
His History and Iconography, " . . . an emblem
through the then-incredible changes that
industrialism was engendering-----but as an
emblem of many things, a sign of the times. It
became clear to me very early on that I was
studying modern life by tracing the meanings of
this sign. And more, I was gaining a
perspective on modern life that was fair to
people's real experience of it."
A look at who was wearing bowler hats, from
the mid-19th Century onward, tells a lot about
this style’s resonance as a symbol for its time.
Again, Professor Robinson, “As more and more
bowler-hatted figures turned up in my study,
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they seemed to express something
textured and true about la vie moderne.
Gamekeepers, squires, street vendors,
omnibus drivers, counterjumpers,
bankers, union men, women on
horseback and in cabaret acts, detectives
and hanging judges, dictators and bums---
all of these seemed more important in
their relations than in their variety, however
elusive those relations and seemingly
random that variety.” The variety, of course,
is significant. Hats had always denoted
rank in society, for example, gentlemen
wore top hats (and cocked hats before top
hats) while the lower social strata wore
cloth caps (picture Dickens’ street
urchins). Everyman (and woman too if she
was so inclined to push the social-fashion
envelope) was wearing a bowler.
Whether the wearer was making a
statement about his liberation, or being
glib or ironic, the fact is that both the union
man and the banker wore the same hat.
Something important was being conveyed
through this simple article of headwear. As
each of us who has ever put on any hat
knows, one cannot place this apparel
article on one’s head totally
unselfconsciously. The bowler hat marked
a change, and the “modern man” by
wearing one, wanted the world to know
that he was part of it.
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