“How can a hatless man properly greet a lady?” the British trade journal Tailor & Cutter demanded of President John F Kennedy in 1963. Kennedy was the first American president to go bareheaded, and hat manufacturers apparently cite this fact as the reason why their industry failed. Or so it is popularly believed. In Hatless Jack, Steinberg examines why Kennedy was so reluctant to wear a hat in public - was it really because Khrushchev always did wear a homburg? Was Kennedy really that powerful a symbol to American men that they would go hatless in droves just because the president declined to wear a fedora? Steinberg charts the attempts of the hat-makers of America to persuade their new, charismatic leader to save their declining industry. Along the way, he also uncovers the now nearly-forgotten rituals of hat-wearing, including hat-check girls, straw-hat riots, and ways of stopping the wind from blowing one’s hat off.
Blaming Kennedy was the most complicated of three flawed theories given for the death of hats: "One is that men grew tired of being compelled to wear hats in the military during World War II, and abandoned the fashion when they returned to civilian life. The second is that the growing popularity of automobiles, with their isolation, heaters, and low roofs, killed off men's hats." As Steinberg laments, “In the past a man could, physically, go into the street hatless, and some did. But those all-important passers-by would certainly notice such a man and wonder about him. Maybe he was deranged, or penniless, or drunk.”
Steinberg doesn't confine his musings to twentieth-century America. He also provides fascinating insights on male hat customs the world over from a number of eras. For instance, Kemal Atatürk banned the fez in Turkey in the 1920’s, and the Mussolini made straw hats compulsory in fascist Italy. In the 1930’s the Hat Style Council (an industry body) agreed that the well-dressed man must own a dozen hats to be “exactly right [for] every occasion”. Mr Steinberg offers many gleaming nuggets of information. He tells us of the social history of the collapsible opera hat; of Abraham Lincoln’s habit of storing papers and letters inside his stovepipe hat; he gives us a fascinating economic history of the lucrative hat-check concessions in restaurants and nightclubs in the 1920’s and 1930’s; and h explains the peculiar craze in the early days of aeroplane travel of dispatching one’s hat on a world tour.
Neil Steinberg has written a captivating and enthralling book, one that will appeal to anyone with an interest in hats and hat-lore.
Hatless Jack by Neil Steinberg. Published by Granta Books.
(A version of this book review first appeared in The Chap magazine.)
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