Hatless Jack

Neil Steinberg's Hatless Jack is a quick read full of interesting anecdotes that exhaustively covers the rise and fall of hat fashion in America. What's really useful is its excellent bibliography.

Hats in Art History

The Village Hat Shop has a nice selection of images of hats in Western art.

The Bowler

The bowler resonates with such historical and social significance that it's impossible to capture its importance in a short post. Indeed, F.M. Robinson has written an entire book on the subject:
The Man in the Bowler Hat: His History and Iconography, cataloguing its adoption by: "Gamekeepers, squires, street vendors, omnibus drivers, counterjumpers, bankers, union men, women on horseback and in cabaret acts, detectives and hanging judges, dictators and bums." Charlie Chaplin, Laurel & Hardey, Rene Magritte, Samuel Beckett, Herge, Anthony Burgess, and Milan Kundera used the bowler as a symbol both instantly recognizable and endlessly mutable.
The Bowler (or Coke or Derby) was created in 1850 by Mr. Lock of St. James Street. The "iron hat" was coated with shellac and was, I imagine, more social signifier than comfortable headdress. Remarkably, it came to be associated with both everyman and the ruling classes, with both men and women, and hence its long lasting appeal. (see magritte, smith)

Felt

Felt is the oldest form of cloth. Fabulous Hats, which is turning out to be a great reference tool for this sort of thing, describes felt as "the undisputed protagonist on the stage of men’s head dress." The artist Josef Beuys used felt extensively in his work. And he was rarely seen without his felt hat.

Otzi's Hat

A few years ago, a body was discovered in a melting glacier near the border between Austria and Italy. 'It turned out to be 5,300 years old, the oldest frozen mummy ever found. Named Ötzi the Iceman after the Ötztal area where he was found, he became a worldwide sensation.' It's a fantastic trove for archaeologists, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, and historians. Otzi's hat was of brown bear fur. It's extraordinary and humbling to imagine the skill, creativity (would they have recognized that term as useful or understood it differently, maybe as inventiveness or inspiration?), and strength of a people who lived and prospered in such an environment so long ago. ref

A History of Hats

Fabulous Hats is 'a free version of various chapters drawn from the book “Fabulous Hats” written by Giuliana Berengan.'