Hat & Headwear Definitions — hats, caps, helmets and headwear terms from Apparel Search
A petasos is a style of hat, usually made of felt, with a broad, floppy brim. It was worn by farmers in classical times and was considered characteristic of rural people. The name is the Greek and Latin word for any hat. Representations of the classical god Mercury are often identified by a petasos, which he often wears, and his petasos usually has little wings attached.
A similar hat was worn by hippies.
Representations of the Classical god Mercury (mythology) are often identified by a petasos, which he often wears. His petasos usually has little wings attached.
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The petasos is identified first by its brim: broad and floppy, on a hat usually made of felt. Those two qualities work together. A broad brim extends well beyond the crown on all sides, so the hat presents a wide, low silhouette very different from a close cap or a stiff, shaped hat. A floppy brim does not hold a rigid line, so it falls and moves softly rather than keeping a fixed, formal edge. Felt, the usual material, can be formed into such a hat as a soft, continuous material, giving a covering that is simple in construction and easy to recognise in images from classical times. In a period visual record, that wide soft outline is the feature that lets a viewer name the hat at once.
Its wearers explain its place in that record. The petasos was worn by farmers in classical times and was considered characteristic of rural people. A hat becomes characteristic of a group when it is seen on them so consistently that it starts to stand for them, and that is the status the petasos reached: in classical imagery and description, the broad floppy felt hat could signal a country person before anything else about the figure was read. That association is practical in origin. Rural work is outdoor work, spent under open sky rather than under roofs, and headwear for such a life is everyday equipment rather than ceremony. A simple felt hat with a generous brim belongs to that world of daily labour, and its repeated appearance on farmers is what turned a useful hat into a rural emblem.
The name carries an unusual breadth of its own. Petasos is the Greek and Latin word for any hat, so the word began with a general meaning wider than the single style it now names. That kind of narrowing is common in the language of dress: a general word becomes attached to the most familiar or most distinctive example, until the specific form is what the word brings to mind. Here the form that claimed the general word was the broad-brimmed felt hat of rural wearers. When the term petasos is used for a hat today, it therefore points to that classical style, even though Greek and Latin speakers could use the same word for headwear in general.
The most famous wearer gives the hat its second, quite different association. Representations of the classical god Mercury are often identified by a petasos, which he often wears, and his petasos usually has little wings attached. The wings are the distinguishing detail: an ordinary petasos is a plain felt hat with a broad floppy brim, while Mercury's version carries wings that mark the figure as the god rather than a farmer. That makes the petasos a useful identification tool in classical art, where a winged broad-brimmed hat on a figure is a strong clue to who is being shown. The same basic hat thus does two jobs in the classical world, one social and one mythological. On farmers it signals rural life, and on Mercury, with wings added, it signals a god, and a similar hat was also worn by hippies in a much later period, showing how a simple, soft, wide-brimmed form can be taken up again by a very different group of wearers.
A petasos is a style of hat, usually made of felt, with a broad, floppy brim. The name is the Greek and Latin word for any hat, although it came to describe this particular broad-brimmed form.
The petasos was worn by farmers in classical times and was considered characteristic of rural people. Its broad, floppy brim suited outdoor rural life, and the hat became a visual sign of country people.
Representations of the classical god Mercury are often identified by a petasos, which he often wears. His petasos usually has little wings attached, which distinguish the god's version from the ordinary felt hat worn by farmers.