Cocked Hat

Triangular, Pinned Up and Pointed at Both Ends

The cocked hat is best understood as a brim that has been deliberately folded into architecture. The black-coloured hat is triangular in shape, with the brim at the left and right sides turned up and pinned together, and the front and back ends are pointed. Nothing about that outline is accidental. Turning the brim up at the sides lifts it clear of the shoulders and of a raised sword arm, gives the hat a tall, formal profile from the front, and creates the pointed fore-and-aft silhouette that reads instantly as official dress in portraits and photographs. Pinning the turned-up brim holds that engineered shape permanently, so a cocked hat is not styled each time it is worn like a soft hat; it is manufactured into its triangle and kept that way.

Its ancestry is stated plainly: the cocked hat evolved from the bicorne. The bicorne had already begun the process, turning up halves of a broad brim and pinning them together to form first a semi-circular and then a more triangular shape worn with a cockade. The cocked hat is the settled, later form of that experiment, the version in which the triangular shape, side pinning and pointed ends became the standard pattern for formal official headgear. Naming matters here, because bicorne and cocked hat overlap in period writing; the triangular, side-pinned form described on this page is the cocked hat proper.

The Hat of Officials, Plain for the Navy and Feathered for Others

From the mid-19th century until the beginning of World War II, the cocked hat was a form of formal headgear worn by certain civilian, military and naval officials, and that spread across services is what its decoration maps. There is usually a cockade in the national colours at the right side, placing the wearer's allegiance at a fixed, conventional position, and the hat is often trimmed in gold or silver. Beyond that shared base, decoration divided by role. Naval officers wore this hat without further decorations, a restraint that suited naval uniform. Those worn by military and civilian officials, by contrast, may be lavishly decorated with coloured ostrich or swan feathers, so that at a state occasion the plain naval cocked hat and a feathered civilian or military one announced different kinds of authority while sharing exactly the same triangular form.

The ending of the cocked hat's era was abrupt and general. Navies around the world, once almost universal in using cocked hats, ceased wearing them at the beginning of World War II, as practical wartime uniform displaced full formal dress across services. The story does not end quite there, however. After the war, some military, diplomatic and colonial officials resumed wearing the cocked hat at very formal occasions, and occasionally still do so today. That survival pattern is typical of ceremonial dress: an item stops being everyday uniform, then persists precisely because its formality, its cockade, its gold or silver trim and its feathers carry historical weight that a modern cap cannot. When a cocked hat appears now, it is chosen for that weight, as a deliberate link to the two centuries of officials who wore the same black triangle before it.

In portraits, photographs and surviving examples, identification rests on the combination rather than any single feature: black colour, triangular outline, brim turned up and pinned at the left and right sides, pointed front and back ends, and a cockade at the right side. Gold or silver trim supports the identification, and coloured ostrich or swan feathers, where present, point away from naval use and towards a military or civilian official. A broad-brimmed hat with only the front and rear turned up belongs to the earlier bicorne stage of the family, while the fully triangular, side-pinned form is the cocked hat in its settled, formal sense.