Trilbies are Fashionable Again! - 20 April 2001

"Death," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, "is knocking at the door. Let him knock, we have other things in mind."

Well the situation is not quite as drastic as that, we hope. But when carbon dioxide, arsenical poisoning and other similar horrors are knocking at the door it may sound glib to say there is a social minor revolution on our mind which will, in the short run at least, mean more to more people than the likely outcome of these wars and alarums.

First, on those contentious issues of the new administration which seem to have upset Europe more than they've upset the democratic opposition, for the time being I simply wish to make one point. Two political issues have come ballooning up on our horizon out of all proportion to their meaning now or relevance to the near future.

They were issues pushed into the spotlight, not by Congress - which was in recess - but by the retiring President Clinton who exercised a little-known privilege of a retiring president in mysterious and, we may say, mean ways.

Each of these two explosive issues - carbon dioxide emissions, arsenic levels in water - came into the public eye as executive orders, which a president is allowed to sign in between congresses when there is no legislative power. There was before middle January indeed no Congress.

First, Kyoto was not going to be brought up till a July meeting of the 89 countries who signed an agreement to reduce industrial fossil fuel emissions, sometime in the future. The agreement then had to be ratified.

Mr Clinton, who would bear no further responsibility for anything he signed, thought he'd have a little fun embarrassing the incoming administration. He'd sign orders which would be law unless revoked by the new president, laws that had not a possible chance of passing the Congress.

A timid trial balloon on carbon dioxide had long ago been shot down - 95 to none - in the Senate. And in the present state of industry it would be 100 to none.

And none of those 89 signing nations has itself ratified the Treaty either but they could piously bemoan the fact that America - the superpower - hadn't either.

We've been so busy since the electoral chaos of last November, so busy with the mischief of Mr Clinton, the so-called bloopers of President Bush, so busy with the Chinese and the Israelis, that I've fallen behind on my role as social historian.

I have to confess that in the general dumbing down of morals and manners in the Western world one of my generation - and I find a couple of earlier generations - there is one social convention that appears to be now universal: The convention of how most people, ordinary people, decent or indecent, dress.

And I can only say that to my eyes today, from Beijing to San Francisco, from Chicago to London, to Stockholm to wherever, men are expected to dress like unemployed plumbers and women like impoverished medieval peasants.

But now with the first flush of spring in these parts comes sprightly news. Rating a four-column headline in the New York Times, in a weekly section called The City. The headline states the jaunty news: "You can leave your hat on, fedoras are snazzy again".

To many English-speaking listeners, outside the United States, I realise that headline will be a puzzle. Suppose I translate it into British English: Trilbies are fashionable again!

I hesitate once more. It could well be there's a generation in Britain, America, Australia, India, that doesn't know what a trilby is. Well you may have guessed that they're the same thing.

Look up in Webster: "Fedora - a soft felt hat with the crown creased lengthwise and a somewhat curved brim." Now the Oxford Dictionary on trilby: "Soft felt hat with lengthwise dent in the crown and narrow brim."

One of them cribbed from the other, though I think "crown creased lengthwise" is truer than dent.

Whatever your age you either know or don't know at once what I'm talking about.

Think - says the Times reporter - think of Frank Sinatra with the loosened necktie - remember - and his fedora/trilby slanted over his knowing blue eyes - think of movie gangsters. The New York Times goes on: "That old film noir fashion, so often described as jaunty or rakish, is staging a modest comeback in New York."

That sentence was plainly written by a very young man. My father and his father wore nothing but trilbies and they would have blushed a violent purple if anyone had ever called them rakish or jaunty.

The trilby/fedora came in 30 years before Frank Sinatra was born. Eighty more years before those 1940s films the reporter jauntily calls "films noir". To be exact the fedora came in in 1882 and the trilby in 1894.

Now how can we possibly say so precisely when a fashion started? Because the fedora was named after the heroine of a play written by Sardou, which had its opening on 11 December 1882 in Paris.

The heroine was Sarah Bernhardt and she wore this new, adorable soft felt hat with the crown creased lengthwise. It became an instant fashion and became called fedora. It was picked up for women. Later, either with a soft or hard brim, by men.

As for Trilby, that was a novel written by George Du Maurier. It introduced to the London fiction-reading public an artists' model in, coincidentally, Paris pursued by three young art students.

She gets engaged to one of them but breaks it off when she comes under the hypnotic influence of a sinister Hungarian musician who mesmerises her into becoming a great singer. His name is - guess what? - Svengali. Svengali dies suddenly of a heart attack and Trilby, alas, loses her voice.

Quite a novel. It was the 1894 best seller among fiction readers. But even better selling among readers and non-readers was the hat that Trilby wore.

It was seen in the illustrations to the novel to be none other than that self same New York fashion of a dozen years before - the soft felt hat with the crown creased lengthwise.

From photographs of the day and the early news reels I gather that it was, for a short time in England anyway, worn daringly by the more rakish society women. It was worn by women forever in Germany but then quickly adopted by men and in no time was the one alternative to a bowler - in this country a derby - and worn by men of all classes.

All my schoolmasters wore them and we, the pupil generation was about to do the same when a new, strange fashion took over. In the early 1920s, at Oxbridge anyway, undergraduates wore boaters, flat straw hats, in summer.

But by my time, by the late 20s, hats of any sort went out of fashion. I remember going home in the spring vacation of 1928 to visit a favourite master.

After the usual greetings he remarked, with a tolerant smile: "I see you too have joined the no-hat brigade."

Well that brigade became a regiment and before very long a world army, which was murder on the hat manufacturers.

I once had a college friend, a cultivated, high-minded man - an Englishman - who decided early on to make a career in good works, to help disperse to deserving causes the wealth of a famous philanthropist.

I lost touch with him but heard that he'd married a very rich young woman. Meeting him years later I noticed, to myself, that he appeared to have a very modest way of life.

Years later, quite of his own accord, he told me with a rueful look: "I thought I'd married an heiress but I didn't realise until it was too late that her father had gone bust."

His father-in-law was a maker of a special sort of summer hat for men, a very soigné straw hat, at an earlier time almost compulsory among fashion conscious young men. But by the 1940s it had vanished.

My rueful friend, by the way, never took to President John Kennedy, not from the day of his inauguration when, for the first time in history, a president rode to his inauguration carrying but wearing no hat at all.

"Shouldn't be surprised," said my friend, "if he mightn't turn out to be something of a bounder."

It was not the presidential nod that severely damaged another clothing industry but a single casual scene in a movie.

In 1934 Clark Gable appeared with Claudette Colbert in a Frank Capra movie that took all the honours and the Oscar. It was called: It Happened One Night and was about a newspaper reporter's pursuit by bus and by hike of an heiress fleeing from an arranged marriage.

In a motel scene Clark Gable undressed to go to bed, took off his tie and his shirt and to the awe and stupefaction of the entire country under his shirt was nothing but Clark Gable. In short and shocking words, he was not wearing what in one or other country was known as a vest, singlet or undershirt.

The showbiz magazine Variety reported that in some parts of the country this amazing scene was greeted first with a gasp and then with applause. Anyway the scene was enough to ruin the undershirt trade.

But now the word of the New York Times is that the young are raiding grandpa's closet.

"I wore it," said one young boy, "I wore it as a kind of goof but now I get compliments."

I must take my little walk with my normal well-worn trilby. I've worn nothing else for decades.

A very young boy, seeing me leave our apartment house, said: "Wow, snaky cool."

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