Fashion trends come and go and some are more lasting than others. But in recent times, at least, has any trend been so dramatic as the decline in hat-wearing by men? asks Frank McNally
Contrast it with the other half of the market, which still flourishes. At the high end, the woman's hat mirrors the history of modern art: going from naturalism to abstraction, to sometimes looking like an entry for the Turner Prize. The man's hat, meanwhile, faces extinction.
Its historic importance is still illustrated in everyday speech. We pass the hat around, take it off in admiration, keep secrets under it, talk through it, and threaten to eat it. That such metaphors derive mostly from men's headgear is clear.
"Throwing your hat into the ring" used to be the way you accepted a boxer's challenge to beat all comers. Similarly, the original thing you did "at the drop of a hat" was start fighting.
Fashion itself gives us another such metaphor. When anything loses its currency now, we call it "old hat" - a back-handed tribute to the longevity that a well-made bowler or Panama once guaranteed. Even the durable fashions of yesteryear might change before your hat wore out. Now the phrase has a certain poignancy, because it can be applied to one half of the entire hat-making industry.
The most common head covering for men in modern Ireland, arguably, is the one made from hard plastic and worn on building sites. It's the only hat Bertie Ahern would be caught dead in, anyway. The flat cap is still common enough, at least in the country. After that, the next most popular items are probably the baseball cap - still a crime against fashion - and the various woolly things that serve the purely functional role of preventing heat-loss for joggers and cyclists.
Uniforms apart, there is only one group of Irishmen who still make a point of hat-wearing. They will be out in force at Cheltenham next month, with the horses they train or own. The trilby is almost a uniform for this small community, except for a few refuseniks who go bare-headed, and the charismatic Monaghan man Oliver Brady, who does the unthinkable for a trainer by wearing a cap.
In the middle of the last century, there was a similar cult among Irish writers. Not even Myles Na Gopaleen - formerly of this parish - was immune from it. In his biography of Myles's creator, Anthony Cronin writes that in 1938, Brian O'Nolan sought an advance from publishers on the grounds that he needed to buy "a black hat and other accessories".
The felt fedora was de rigueur for writers at the time, and the wider the better. The wing-span of the brim seems to have been an indicator of literary seriousness. O'Nolan's hat was "not as wide-brimmed as some", says Cronin, "but it was an assertion all the same that he belonged to the Dublin community of letters".
Hat wearing had passed its prime even in 1938, however. A measure of how far it had already fallen is a novel called A Life's Morning, written half a century earlier by Englishman George Gissing.
Gissing specialised in characters imprisoned by social conventions, and A Life's Morningconcerns a man whose life is destroyed because he loses his hat on the way to work. It being taboo in 1888 for a respectable male to go bare-headed in public, the protagonist is forced to steal from his employer to buy a replacement, with disastrous results.
Writing about Gissing in the 1940s, George Orwell marvelled at how such conventions could be overturned. "Today, if you had somehow contrived to lose your trousers, you would probably embezzle money rather than walk about in your underpants. In the [1880s] the necessity would have seemed equally strong in the case of a hat. Even 30 or 40 years ago, indeed, bare-headed men were booed at in the street. Then, for no very clear reason, hatlessness became respectable."
Outside horse-racing, that respectability has deepened ever since. The century-long decline of the men's hat industry is now almost complete, a point brought home to me recently by a book about horse-racing: Bill Barich's A Fine Place to Daydream.
Barich is a Californian who fell in love with an Irishwoman, moved here, and then got caught up in our real national sport. The book describes his adventures as a punter during the 2003-2004 jumps-racing season, culminating in a trip to Cheltenham. Immersing himself in the role, he even decided to buy a trilby before departing to the Cotswolds, and so took himself to Coyle's Hatters in Aungier Street, Dublin.
"Inside the shop," the book records, "the aged proprietor was huddled by a gas fire. He complained that his next shipment of trilbys was stranded on the Naas Road. 'I could have sold six this week alone!' he groaned, as if that might equal a record." The old man went on to recall a time when his deliveries arrived by horse and cart. But Barich left the shop hatless and had to buy a trilby-shaped waterproof from Marks and Spencer instead.
The Aungier Street hatter sounded like an interesting interviewee on this subject. I had probably passed his shop a hundred times without noticing. But it's never too late, I thought, as I called there this week.
I was wrong. Sometimes it is too late. The sign on the shop still said "hatter", but the shutters were down. I have since learned that Coyle's closed - amid some publicity, apparently - only weeks after Barich visited. The relevant section of the Golden Pages is now even more dominated by fun shop names ("Hatitudes", "Hat's Amazing", "Foxrock Fillies Hat Hire") that testify to the continued buoyancy of one half of the industry. As for the male market, even the old-timers are throwing their hat at it.
Footnote: Fans of one of the aforementioned hat wearers might like to check out a show called Time, Gentlemen, Pleaaase, based on the writings of Flann O'Brien/Myles na Gopaleen. Part of the Dublin Shakespeare Society's centenary celebrations, it's on tonight and tomorrow night at the Teachers' Club, Parnell Square, Dublin.. Tickets from 01-6588549, or clionacleary@ireland.com.