Bowler Hat

Photographer: Paul Strand  Photo: (Untitled)  Year: 1916

A Hard Hat Before the Hard Hat

The bowler began as protection, not as a fashion statement. It is a hard felt hat, originally created for an English James Coke in 1850, and designed to be hard to protect the head. That single decision, to make a felt hat rigid and domed rather than soft and shapable, explains everything that followed. A hard, rounded crown sheds knocks, a firm brim holds its line, and the finished hat keeps its shape through daily use in a way soft felt hats worn by the lower middle classes did not. From that practical start the bowler evolved with its popularity in both England and the USA, crossing the Atlantic and acquiring a second name in the process, since in the United States this hat is also known as a derby hat. Bowler and derby are not two similar hats; they are the same hat under British and American names, and recognising that saves a good deal of confusion when reading period photographs, catalogues and costume credits on either side of the ocean.

Hardness also made the bowler durable as an image. A soft hat changes with every handling, but a bowler looks the same in 1850, in 1900 and in a film a century later, which is one reason it could become a visual shorthand for a character, a class and a city, all in one rounded silhouette.

Between the Top Hat and the Soft Hat

The bowler's social position was as carefully placed as its shape. As it peaked in popularity towards the end of the 1800s, it offered a midway between the formality of the top hat associated with the upper classes and the casual nature of soft felt hats worn by the lower middle classes. That middle ground was exactly where the growing world of clerks, managers and city professionals lived, and the bowler became the traditional headwear of London city gents, so closely identified with that world that it has become something of a British cultural icon. A second tradition carried the same hat elsewhere: it was traditionally also worn by members of the Orange Order in Northern Ireland during their 12th July annual parades, though usage has declined there as it has in everyday dress.

The decline, when it came, was about hats in general as much as this hat in particular. British men stopped wearing hats as a matter of course in the 1960s, and most young British people in the 21st century have never seen a bowler hat worn as part of normal dress. What survived was the bowler on screen, on stage and on canvas, where its instant readability is unmatched. Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, the slapstick comedy duo of the 1920s and 30s, and Charlie Chaplin, another comedian from the early 1900s, built part of their silhouettes on it, which is why the hat now reads as comic as readily as it once read as respectable. John Steed of Avengers fame wears this hat, clarinetist Acker Bilk wears this hat also, and Duckie wears this style in the 1986 film Pretty in Pink. In Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, the only description of costume is that all four major characters wear them. The paintings of Belgian Surrealist artist Rene Magritte return to it again and again, and it appears in the movie A Clockwork Orange and on Benito Mussolini, the fascist Italian dictator, proof that the same hard dome can signal respectability, comedy, menace or absurdity depending entirely on who is placed underneath it.