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When Emily Post laid down her rules regarding top hats, she included one that had nothing to do with etiquette. "Wear it level on your head," she said. Now, I’ll accept Mrs. Post’s authority when it comes to whether I should take my hat off in an elevator, but as to how my hat should sit on my head, no thank you. As it happens, she was dead wrong about the top hat. A man should not wear it flat on his head. He should wear it tilted forward and to one side - very slightly though, no more than 10 degrees in either direction - about the same angle Lord Ribblesdale wore his in the famous portrait by John Singer Sargent.
I single out Lord Ribblesdale, because as he is seen in the Sargent portrait he represents the ultimate in top-hatted aplomb. He wears a long riding coat, a white waistcoat, shiny black riding boots, and jodhpurs. One hand rests on his hip, the other clutches a riding crop, and he looks straight out of the canvas in a strong, forthright manner. The painting is a study in refined self-assurance, which is precisely the attitude the top hat was intended to convey. This is the hat, after all, that inspired the expression "high hat" as a designation of arrogance and snobbishness. Ribblesdale himself was the epitome of the Edwardian aristocrat; he was master of the backhands and lord-in-waiting to Queen Victoria. The hat that sat so perfectly on his head was the hat that dominated the nineteenth century.
This was a surprise to everybody, because his top hat caused a riot the first time it was seen in London. The perpetrator was a haberdasher name John Hetherington, who designed it, made it and was the first person to wear it into the street. According to a contemporary newspaper account, passersby panicked at the sight. Several women fainted, children screamed, dogs yelped, and an errand boy’s arm was broken when he was trampled by the mob. Hetherington was hauled into court for wearing "a tall structure having a shining luster calculated to frighten timid people." It was much ado about nothing, really; Hetherington had merely concocted a silk-covered variation of the contemporary riding hat, which had a wider brim, a lower crown, and was made of beaver. There was initial resistance to Hetherington’s silk topper from those who wanted to continue wearing beaver hats. But in 1850 Prince Albert started wearing top hats made of "hatter’s plush" (a fine silk shag), and that effectively settled the questions; coincidentally it also all but wiped out the beaver-trapping industry in America.
It’s easy to see from old photographs and drawings why the nineteenth century is sometimes know as the Century of the Top Hat. Men wore top hats for business, pleasure and formal occasions - pearl gray for daytime, black for day or night. The historian James Laver once made the observation that an assemblage of toppers looked like factory chimneys and thus added to the mood of the industrial era. The height and contour of the hat fluctuated with the decades. In England, post-Brummel dandies went in for flared crowns and swooping brims. Their counterparts in France, known as the Incroyables, wore top hats of such outlandish dimensions that there was no room for them in overcrowded cloakrooms until Antoine Gibus came along in 1823 and invented the collapsible opera hat. Later on, the American financier J. P. Morgan approached the same problem from another angle; he ordered a limousine with an especially high roof so he could ride around without taking his hat off. A milestone of a different sort was achieved in 1814 by a French magician named Louis Comte; he became the first conjurer on record to pull a white rabbit out of a top hat.
By the time Sargent painted Ribblesdale’s portrait in 1902, the top hat was actually nearing the end of its century-long primacy, soon to be replaced by the more compact homburg. In short order, the top hat settled into the status it has today - that of a costume prop, a graceful anachronism worn with white tie, tails and gloves on only the rarest of formal ceremonies.
The top hat is a piece of history now, not really a part of the contemporary wardrobe despite its occasional uses. For a while, back in the 1930s and 1940s, Europeans got the false impression that it was making a comeback in American. They’d been watching Fred Astaire movies and simply assumed that all American men were dressing the way he did. Astaire wore top hats in a dozen or more films (notably Top Hat, in 1935). In fact, I’d have to say that after Lord Ribblesdale, Astaire was one of the most accomplished top hat wearers of all time. He wore the hat tilted, of course - at a jaunty, almost rakish angle. Emily Post would not have approved.
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