There’s something hot about a hat

When an American describes a woman as wearing a ‘Park Avenue Helmet’ you know exactly what is meant. This is a hairdo so precise and sculpted that it trembles, category-wise, between coiffure and armour. Both natural and artificial, it also accurately signals social status.

The link between hats, hair and caste was first made by James Laver in his 1937 classic Taste and Fashion, a book not yet bettered in its field. Oddly, it does not appear in the bibliography of Drake Stutesman’s new cultural history of headwear. But to be fair to NYU’s Professor Stutesman, she does make the compensatingly interesting point that one of the reasons for the decline of the woman’s hat in the 1950s was the introduction of the deadly fixative hairspray, which made the Park Avenue Helmet possible in the first place.

Hat is a good and handsome book, despite its intellectual origins being in Roland Barthes’s mischievous essays deconstructing pop culture.