COLUMN
Italian woollen tricorne, mid-18th century
Felt Hats Redux
by Clair Hughes
Clair Hughes is an independent scholar. She previously held the position of Professor of English and American Literature at the International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan. She is the author of Hats (2017), Dressed in Fiction (2005) and Henry James and the Art of Dress (2001)
Felt has travelled far, from wool stuffed in the sandals of St Clement to protect his toes against the desert heat, to today in the Aude valley in France, where a felt hat business, MontCapel, has
happily sprung back into life. How did somebody, looking at the stuff in Clement’s sandals (the result of friction between wool, heat and feet), make the leap from toe to head and see a hat? A miracle perhaps. Felt had been used across the world for centuries, but it was in medieval Europe that felt hats became more than just protective headgear, and a saintly story was invoked to emphasise its new importance. The story suggests a messy start
to felt. Beaver fur rather than wool produced the best felt, but the process of turning fur into a hat was not only messy, it was arduous, even dangerous – the mercury fumes hatters inhaled while cleaning the fibres caused tremors and madness. A journalist in 1841 found Christys’ London factory “uninviting to persons fastidious to cleanliness”. Consequently, good hats were and are expensive. In 1661 diarist Samuel Pepys paid the equivalent of £284 for his cavalier hat. But whatever the cost, by the 16th
century the felt hat had become the European male’s must-have headgear. Dark felts have been – and still are – essentially male accessories; women, however, regularly filch men’s hats for their power and panache. In the 17th century Henrietta Maria, English King Charles I’s wife, noting how her husband’s feathery black felt gave him distinction and stature (he was small), ‘borrowed’ it, and launched a female fashion for the cavalier hat, which has never died – the late Queen Elizabeth’s last hats were essentially cavaliers. Fix the cavalier’s brim to the crown
44 | the hat magazine #95
in three places, and you have the 18th century’s most popular hat, the tricorne or ‘cocked’ hat. Folding two sides up onto the crown produces the early 19th-century bicorne: Napoleon wore his side-to-side, Wellington, front-to-back. Flattened versions of the bicorne are still carried by high-ranking diplomats. By 1600 the hat industry had wiped out
the European beaver; North American beavers were only saved from extinction by the invention of the silk top hat around 1800, which quickly became the ubiquitous expression of social aspiration. Felts like the slouch hat lost status, but demand for felt took off again when the hard-felt bowler – invented in Britain in 1849 to protect gamekeepers from tree- branches (and poachers) – became the businessman’s headgear worldwide. After mechanisation, felt hat
production around 1900 boomed. King Edward VII launched the homburg; trilbies and fedoras followed, becoming the 20th century’s standard male headgear. In the 1930s, popularised by movie stars like Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, fedoras and trilbies also became high fashion. Little more than fifty years later,
however, the hat works in Stockport, England, in Danbury, Massachusetts, and in the Aude fell silent as automobiles, hairstyles and radical social change made hats ‘old hat’. Before 1950 the Aude valley’s fifteen felt hat businesses exported worldwide; in 2018 the last one fired its nine employees – where there had been 600 – and closed its doors. Then a local consortium stepped in: “I could not accept that this industrial heritage should disappear forever”, their leader Sonia Mielke said. Though knowing little about hats, she organised a cooperative society christened MontCapel, and in 2019, having raised capital and restored the old machinery, production restarted – surely with St Clement’s blessing.
Photo: Alamy
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