Hat by Samantha Bailey. You could make this. I couldn't but you could.

I mentioned on Twitter that I was looking forward to Hats: An Anthology coming to Brisbane and Samantha Bailey, a colleague replied that hats were one of her passions. It turns out she’s been to workshops on making hats and has turned her passion into some amazing pieces that she was kind enough to show me and allow me to share with you (see picture).

This followed from an encounter with another colleague, one who’d stumbled on my blog independently. He brought in a book about hats to show me because, as most of us know, its rare to find someone with whom we can share something like that.

There is something truly unifying about the hat. Hats excite more people who care to or feel comfortable to admit it. More and more I believe it’s only fear that’s holding more people back from joining the ranks of those of us who wear our hearts on our heads.

Protester wearing a bowler hat (a derby) as part of a shorthand for fat cat bankers.

I’ve been exploring a new business offering (at first) self-guided audio walking tours of Sydney (your feedback very welcome!), which has kept me from posting here. Bill’s nice comment on an earlier post and Rosie calling to see if I’m still alive have spurred me to post again, something especially easy to do as the Sydney Morning Herald ran a picture today that hits my favourite theme: hats as a shorthand for character.

The man in the picture is parodying a fat cat financier as part of a protest calling on G20 leaders to cut executive bonuses. The outfit might have worked without the bowler hat (or derby for my US readers) but with the hat we are in no doubt that this man is a banker and a successful one. All this despite bowler hats having been out of fashion for decades but so powerful is the image of the hat that it simply won’t go away. Although this man has probably never seen anyone of any profession wearing a bowler hat, it would have taken him all of a nonosecond to pick the bowler hat as his metonym.

Ruben Guthrie (Toby Schmitz), a young creative director for an advertising agenc

Last night I went to see Brendan Cowell’s entertaining but overly-simple play about alchoholic advertising executive Ruben Guthrie.

I wrote in an earlier post (Hats as a shorthand for character) that I’d picked up the postcard advertising the show because of the picture of the young man in the top hat. I doubted the top hat would feature in the show and, having seen it now, I can confirm that it doesn’t (nor does the scarf).

It confirms what we already know:  different types of hats are imbued with  meaning and values. Your choice of hat is telegraphing something to other people because of associations already concieved. The interesting question is What? What associations, stereotypes and pre-conceptions are associated with what type of hat? For instance, Cowell himself was in the audience last night wearing a patchwork tweed bucket hat that said to me “I’m creative, confident and slightly unusual”.)

This is something I’d like to explore, probably in an instalment of the Open Crown podcast, and I’d love your views on different hat types and how they’re perceived: What is an onlooker going to conclude (rightly or wrongly) about the wearer of a particular type of hat?

Ruben Guthrie (Toby Schmitz), a young creative director for an advertising agency in Brendan Cowell's play of the same name

It’s not an original observation that hats are imbued with so many associations that they can be shorthand for what we’d like to say about ourselves or, in the case of fiction or Hollywood stylists, what we’re saying about others. This must be a relatively new phenomenon, possible only in a time when hats are not universally worn. When everyone wore a hat, only a man’s class could be divined from his hat.

It was because of the picture of the young bloke in the top hat that I picked up the café postcard advertising Ruben Guthrie, Brendan Cowell’s play. What is the photographer/publicist/director telling us about the guy wearing it? He’s eccentric? Creative? Wacky? Charming? Off-beat? Mad as a proverbial? How much harder would it be to say that without the top hat?

I booked my ticket for the week after next because of the review, not the hat, but I am interested to see whether the hat even features in the play. More likely it’s just used in the promotional material as shorthand about Ruben Guthrie, whom the review says is a young creative director for an advertising agency and an alcoholic.

Booking the ticket gave me another chance to see hats as shorthand. This is the homepage of the Belvoir Street Theatre, where Ruben Guthrie is playing:

Count the hats: The Belvoir Street Theatre homepage

Two Ruben Guthrie shots with the top hat, despite there being many other promotional shots to choose from; Geoffrey Rush in his Exit the King crown; and a young woman in a trilby advertising Whore. (What does wearing a man’s hat say about a woman?) That’s four hats above the fold. Number of pictures without hats: 0. (There are two hatless pictures below the fold but that’s still four of the six homepage pictures featuring hats.)

Next time you’re looking at the rows of free postcards in a café, check out the number featuring someone in a hat and ask yourself what they or their stylist are trying to tell you with their hat.