My Theory on Hats
January 7, 2012admin No Comments »(Note: This theory does not apply to baseball caps or hats for warmth, unless they’re truly ridiculous looking, as both of these variety of hats are much too ubiquitous.)
Almost without exception, hats are truly ridiculous. Sure, any hat will cover the top of your head and perhaps keep some warmth in your body on a cold night, or shield your eyes from the glaring sun. Yet real hats, the kind you find at Sacred Feather, a hat store in Madison, possess no real practicality, no real usefulness. They are an accessory of the highest degree, in part because they’re so obvious (where earrings or a necklace might go unnoticed).
I have mostly one hat, a newsies, scottish cap type cap that found me one day on a trip to L.L. Bean, when I had no intention of getting a hat. It’s got fur or wool or something on the inside, making it a warm weather hat, so I only end up wearing it in the winter. As much as I don’t want to wear brown all the time just to spite my mother, the fact is that brown probably looks better on me than black, and this hat, and the jackets it goes with, are no exception.
The thing is, it actually takes a bit of brazen, bravado, or balls to wear a hat out in public. There’s something just totally ridiculous about it, something so impractical and inexplicable. Shoes, pants, shirts, jackets, most other articles of clothing that you can wear can also look good, but that doesn’t negate their primary function of allowing you to walk in the outdoors and protect your feet, or not be naked, or maintain some warmth, or whatever it may be. (Leggings controvert everything I have just said.) Hat simply don’t fit any of those requirements.
Why do I bring this up? Because it feels important to be brazenly ridiculous every once in a while. There’s something succulent about making a show of things simply because on can. It adds character and pizzazz and makes the edges of life that much more interesting. If you take the hat too seriously, you just feel silly. And that, for me at least, is what it’s a reminder of; to not take things too seriously. It gives me license to riposte with my vocabulary, or send innocuous emails around to my office every week riffing about some literary character that strikes my fancy (I’m serious about this one). It gives me permission to banter with friends about ridiculous rules or situations we create and lets me generally try and do something different with the day in and day out. It’s hats.
It’s the cherry on top.
None of this is a particular deep or insightful theory, I just wanted the world to know that I think it should wear more hats, because why not? Everybody looks good in one hat or another. And even if you don’t…so what?
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