Hats once broadcast rank before they became optional
A hat covers the head for weather, ceremony, religion, safety, or style. Official records before 3000 BC are scarce, yet hats were probably already common, and for centuries they signalled social status. In 1215 a church council even required Jews to wear a hat that marked them out.
A hat covers the head for protection from the weather, for ceremonies such as graduations, for religion, comedy, safety, or style; add visors, spikes, or flaps and it shades into headgear. Hats once announced social status, and they still show nationality, branch, rank, or regiment in armies, while police wear peaked caps or brimmed hats like those of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Most can be described by a crown on top, a brim below it, and often a hatband between the two.
The Venus of Willendorf, 27,000 to 30,000 years old, may show a woven hat. Ötzi, the Bronze Age man found frozen in the mountains between Austria and Italy, wore one of the earliest confirmed hats, and a tomb painting from Thebes of around 3200 BC shows a man in a conical straw hat. The Tollund Man, preserved in a Danish bog around 400 BC, still wears a pointed cap of sheepskin and wool strapped under his chin. The Greek petasos was the first known hat with a brim, and the Phrygian cap of freed Greek and Roman slaves later became a liberty emblem in the American and French revolutions.
Hats also singled people out. In 1215 the Fourth Council of the Lateran ordered Jews to wear the Judenhat, usually yellow and pointed or square, which made them targets of antisemitism. Who uncovered for whom mapped the social hierarchy, and Western men traditionally removed their hats in church while women covered their heads, a custom that faded in the West in the 1960s. The word milliner comes from Milan, where the finest hats were made in the eighteenth century.
Royal Ascot, whose Royal Enclosure requires every guest to wear a hat, began the racing tradition later adopted at the Kentucky Derby. James Lock & Co. of St James's Street in London claims to be the oldest hat shop still trading, and the Philippi Collection in Kirkel, Germany, holds more than 500 religious hats. Sizing hides a neat trick: US hat size is head diameter in inches, found by dividing circumference in centimetres by 8, because 2.54 times π is almost exactly 8.
Source: Hat
