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.

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.

Convicted paedophile Dennis Ferguson. If only he could sing and dance.

Channel Nine’s breakfast television in Australia today (Saturday) dedicated the whole morning to the death of Michael Jackson; in print The Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph have pages on the death. Yet in the 30 minutes or so I was watching the TV, there was no mention of the “much-loved superstar’s” fondness for young boys. The newspapers gave it no more than a couple of sentences in all those column inches.

In Australia, as elsewhere in the world, paedophiles get run out of town. But this one was rich and entertaining; that and he tipped his victims and their parents generously. How much easier would Dennis Ferguson’s life be if only he could dance?

Michael Jackson and Jordan Chandler, whom Jackson paid to drop his case against him.

Somewhere along the line years ago it became unacceptably mean to bring up that Michael Jackson was a known child molester. The poor man had endured a troubled childhood and he had that awful skin condition that he’d told Oprah all about. Hadn’t he suffered enough? Leave him alone. (Oddly it was socially acceptable to cringe at his disturbing friendship with Elizabeth Taylor. You were allowed to think that was creepy and beyond the pale.)

Despite his record-setting in the music business, Michael Jackson was unusual for a pop star (let alone the “king of pop”) in that nobody wanted to be Jackson so he had no influence on hats as fashion despite fedoras being a signature part of his look. It’s not that we didn’t notice that fedoras were an important part of his wardrobe. Just look at the role the fedora is playing in the tributes and cash-in attempts that have followed his death.

Sand sculpture of Michael Jackson with fedora (right) on the beach at Puri, India.

Michael Jackson memorial fedora T-shirt on eBay

"Drawing / Painting of a Fedora Hat in Memory of Michael Jackson" by Michael D. Edens

Justin Timberlake puts on a trilby and young boys the world over grab a stingy brim; Harrison Ford wears a fedora in a period film and the Akubra Federation IV is born for today’s snappy dressers (my bias); but Michael Jackson puts on a fedora as part of a contemporary street outfit and no one follows.

I was a teenager when Michael Jackson was in his heyday but no one I knew coveted a fedora because Jackson wore one. And we weren’t less impressionable than today’s Timberlake teenagers: all the girls had their Madonna fingerless black lace gloves while I and every other boy wore black shirts and white pencil ties because of whoever started that.

Maybe now that one of its chief celebrity endorsers is dead, the fedora will come have a chance to emerge from the trilby’s shadow.

Update 9 July 2009: It isn’t often I agree with Bill O’Reilly but this is one of those times.

“Hats have slowly but surely crept back into fashion, but if you’re going to make this part of your wardrobe it’s important that you look like you know what you’re doing.”

So writes menswear designer James Cameron in his new blog, Suits You, in the Fairfax [Australian newspaper stable]. Surely it says something that it took only three posts for James to be talking about hats.

Cameron takes a balanced view on the “formality” of hats, advising:

“What you need to remember if you’re going to wear a hat, and particularly a brimmed style… is to not look like you’re in costume.”

That can be a hard balance to strike, especially when many people can’t help but think Indiana Jones or Dick Tracy whatever hat they see, but Cameron’s piece is full of practical advice without being prescriptive.

Most heartening is the enthusiatic response in the comments section (more than on any other post). I hope Cameron will use them as the springboard for future posts on men’s hats and styling.

Christine Smith, manager of the Hat Works museum in Stockport, Greater Manchester, is quoted putting the decline in hat wearing down to cars.

“Before cars became common they were a useful item of clothing to keep the weather off,” she says.

But that doesn’t make sense. Has umbrella usage declined, too? Even those of us with cars have to get out of them to brave the elements.

Peter Howarth, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph’s men’s fashion magazine, is quoted attributing the decline in hat wearing to the rise of casual clothing:

“Nowadays the expectation we have is that the things we wear will be comfortable. The formal hat fell victim to that general trend.”

Part of me is with Howarth here: I don’t wear anything uncomfortable. But none of my hats is uncomfortable.

Running out of people to quote, the BBC journalist, Stephen Dowling, puts in his own grand statement about hat wearing and formality:

“Hat-wearing for men is often linked to formal behaviour – the tipping of a hat when a lady walks past, the removal of a hat on entry to church, the holding of a hat to the heart during the national anthem, and the throwing aloft at the end of hostilities.”

This is about as insightful and misleading as observing that our hands are “often linked to formal behaviour”, such as hand shakes, salutes, waving and so on.

I quibble, however: the question of why men stopped wearing hats isn’t really of any interest, unless we could reverse the decline if we knew why people stopped wearing hats.

But some good news…

On that note, what is interesting in the piece is the nugget  from Tim Boucher,  proprietor of hat outfitter Bates in London’s Jermyn Street, that he’s seen a 30 per cent increase in sales in the last four years.

However, the readers’ comments are the best part of this weak story, such as the one from Anne Anderson, owner of The Beverley Hat Company in East Yorkshire. She says the word at the trade shows is that hats will be big in the winter of ‘09; and makes the observation that bowlers are for clubbing and trilbies for festivals.

They would say that, wouldn’t they, but let’s hope it’s true

“Hugh Jackman’s outback hat, worn in the film Australia, not only achieved instant fame on the big screen but also popularised the look for men’s casual wear generally,” said Philip Wright of Walter Wright hat manufacturers.

Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman in Australia

In the first Open Crown podcast I said — funnily enough — we needed someone like Hugh Jackman to start wearing hats to lead other men to follow.

Unfortunately I think Philip Wright is heroically drawing a long bow to say that Drover’s battered Akubra has done or will do anything to popularise either that look or hat wearing generally.

It’s dubious that it’s even popularised hatwearing for Hugh himself (a Google images search turns up nothing but hatless Hugh). I could be wrong, though: Wright is quoted in the Telegraph (UK) saying, “Mr Jackman has also been seen sporting some stylish trilby and pork pie hats off screen.” And Rosie, who made Hugh the famous Akubra, says in the podcast that she’s seen him stepping off a plane wearing a snappy hat.

Still, I dispute the likely rise in urban Akubra wearing. In Australia, Akubras are firmly associated with the country. Most young Australian men (and their fathers, come to that) would be as likely to wear an Akubra around Sydney or Melbourne as a New Yorker would be to top off an outfit with a Stetson Hertitage. And this is a climate where we should be wearing Akubras.

I’d love to be wrong of course and see the streets of Luton and elsewhere in the world  full of outback hats but, in the meantime, a hat tip to Philip Wright for managing to get the topic of hat wearing in the news for a little while.