HISTORY
developed by a New Zealander, Edward Le Roy. That yellow sou’wester is still known far and wide as the Gorton’s Fisherman hat in supermarkets across the United States. Quite the trip, and that’s just for the
fabrication. Always geared towards the needs of the waterlogged fishermen, the sou’wester deftly stepped aside to admit the advent of its more versatile cousin, the bucket hat. This may have happened in the Edwardian era. The military had picked up a version of a cut-and-sewn hat in 1908, and included it as a staple of the fatigue wardrobe of soldiers and sailors in a few restructuring design lines. A portrait of Olive Edis, Britain’s first female war photographer, shows her in a crossbreed version of the sou’wester. Her work explored new avenues in lighting and photographic technique and can be
seen in the extensive collection held at the Cromer Museum in England. As a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, Olive Edis posed the high and the mighty along with doing her portraiture of the common man, documenting everyday life, WWI and society. She inadvertently tracked fashion and, for our purposes, we can see many an early version of the bucket hat plotted in the fishermen’s gear. Her own next-gen Edwardian sou’wester mixes this documentation with an early slant on fashion representation. Bifurcating the bucket hat’s history as often is the case, we see that social context often controlled design development.
Newsboy in St. Louis, Missouri, 1910
Further inland, in another country away from the coastal influence and the diverse previous treatments of the fabric used in fishermen’s gear, farmers in Ireland might be cited with the bucket hat’s next appearance on its road to becoming a contemporary glamour accessory. At this juncture, the raw wool so steeped in sheep’s lanolin was woven into cloth for garments, knitted into sweaters luckily, and used to make a fabric hat. Where the flat Irish cap (later adapted by newsboys, gangsters and sportsmen of the 1920s) has practically
been designated a national style icon, the Irish ‘walking’ hat lands on its own pedestal. Worn with a sloped brim and a squared-off crown, the tweed hat kept off rain and wind. Waterproof and packable, the hat could easily have become a staple in the Edwardian gentleman’s wardrobe for his country walks. The working men of the fields wore it as a practical part of their daily gear as they headed off to field and hillock. These tweed hats made from the
handwoven industrious cottage wool mills in the Hebrides kept Harris tweed alive for the native-born and tourist alike. Popular culture references to this shape can be seen on Fred Astaire as he played the patriarch in the whimsical 1968 film Finian’s Rainbow. Or on the head of Sean Connery playing the father to Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones.
Australian member of the Light Horse cavalry, 1940s
The shape had gone from a rounded, contoured crown with a wonky asymmetrical brim to a neat contained line. Round crowns remained as a variation of course, but for us the classic bucket resembles just that: a bucket flat on the top and sloped in the brim. As a bush hat in the United States fatigue gear accessory list, the bucket stayed alive until our day. Worn in a denim, olive drab, khaki or camouflage version, the bucket gained an entire swarm of new names and grew on its practical side, maintaining visibility for decades. Developed as an easy
Sean Connery (r) in ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’, 1989
hat to wear in tropical warfare, the hat might be trimmed with twill tape on the exterior of the crown so the soldier could insert branches as undergrowth camouflage. Where the brim proved too long (blocking vision), soldiers themselves would cut it shorter, against regulations to be sure, thus creating a neater shape and a standard version of what we know today as more typical. Americans, Brits, Aussies and the opposition all wore versions of this hat. One manufacturer in Great Britain, J. Collet Ltd of London, who began as a ladies’ millinery concern,
february 2022 | 47 Fred Astaire in ‘Finian's Rainbow’, 1968
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