November 11, 2007
Discourse on Hats
It’s only recently occurred to me to think of the increasingly large number of hats I own as a collection. I’ve never had the attention span or acquisitiveness to be much of a collector, but if I did collect anything, I think I would collect hats.
My friend Ricky Price has a sort-of mask collection similar to my sort-of hat collection. Masks are great because they’re so loaded with symbolic, almost Jungian, resonance, especially for anyone with an interest in theatre. Every culture has masks. Not only do they conjure images of mankind’s most primal religious and artistic instincts, shamanistic rituals and Dionysian performances and so forth, but our collective subconsciousness continues to be tickled by the idea of masks and what they represent, that thrilling slipperiness of identity and individuality. And also there was that Jim Carrey movie which was pretty cool.
Hats have lots of uses. A wide brimmed hat can keep the sun out of your eyes. A wool cap can keep your skull warm on chilly days. A hat made of tin foil can prevent the government from stealing your thoughts. But from the very early days of hat history, the true purpose of millinery has always been thus: the assertion of identity. Hats distinguish the Pilgrim from the Indian, the Chef from the Policeman, the Pope from the Kaiser. I could don a helmet with horns and be instantly recognizable as a viking. I could slap on a yarmulke and pass for Jewish. I could wear a hardhat or a Yankees cap and become a member of the Village People or a tool, respectively.
What fascinates me about hats as opposed to masks is how transparent and arbitrary the disguise is. Hats represent the way I prefer to think of identity: something external, voluntarily worn and easily knocked off by the wind. The silly, shifting foundations that we cling to like ethnicity, class, religion and occupation can all be signified by hats. They can be easily interchanged depending on one’s mood or what company happen to be present. They’re more frivolous than masks, less self-serious.
Depending on how you look at it, hats might symbolize our basest instincts or our higher nature. True, there’s something vain and perhaps a little pathetic about hats, the way we desperately thrust our flimsy felt identity under people’s noses (or perhaps above them if you’re slightly taller), and goodness knows how many people have been killed throughout history because they were caught wearing the wrong hat. Still, hats are emblematic of our ability to choose who we want to be, to craft a character, however transparently affected, out of the unindividuated lumps of being at our disposal. For whatever reason, perhaps because they rest so close to our minds, hats have been granted this unique theatrical power by collective consent. Consider: a man carrying a broadsword, wearing a wolf skin vest and a ten gallon hat, is clearly a viking who wants to be a cowboy and not the other way around.
A collage of photos from Xinjiang (see Dispatch from the Silk Road) where headwear signifies ethnicity, age and marital status among other things.