Headwear has been worn for millennia, for warmth, protection and to fulfil social expectations, with myriad styles developing globally. Often displaying national or regional

characteristics, or signifying religious faith, social status or occupation, hats can be symbolic, practical and fashionable. Historically, European men donned warm fur or fabric headwear for cold weather and lightweight straw hats in summer. By the 1300s, fitted skull caps or coifs were associated with dignitaries, while working men wore hooded capes. Hoods were broadly known by the French term chaperon and during the 1400s, as fashion advanced, a padded roll or bourrelet formed a firm circular base, the hood fabric left trailing or wound turban-like around the head. By 1500 male headwear ranged from chaperons with wide bourrelets and shaggy flat hats, to neat acorn-cup hats perched on the head.

Early Tudor headwear included caps of blocked felt with brims up-turned around the crown and functional knitted flat caps for ordinary men. Courtly styles comprised the jewelled ‘Milan bonnet’ and halo-like feather-trimmed French bonnet, bonnets essentially denoting toque-like, brimless hats. Jewelled velvet bonnets remained fashionable in Elizabethan England, giving way to the tall-crowned ‘Copotain’ or sugar-loaf hat towards 1600. Early-Stuart styles generally featured wider brims and in time the black beaver hat, or castor, became an established style, following the opening up of the Canadian and North American fur trade. Shapes varied subtly, but castors were widely worn among the social elite and merchant classes.

Beaver skin remained common for formal hats for over 200 years, about 500,000 beavers killed annually for the purpose. The three-cornered (tricorne) beaver hat dominated Georgian fashion, aristocratic variants decorated with feathers, gold lace and cockades. Outdoor workers generally wore plain brimmed hats like the ‘wide-awake’ and this inspired the simple round hat that gained favour from the 1780s, considered a ‘democratic’ mode. In the early-1800s hat crowns grew taller, evolving into the Victorian ‘top hat’, tall ‘stovepipe’ beaver top hats common until the 1850s, followed by lower-crowned silk top hats. By 1860 a stiff round-crowned bowler hat was a semi-formal alternative, remaining in use until after the mid-20th century, latterly for city business wear. From the 1890s the cloth cap – originally a country and sporting style – became the working man’s preferred headwear, straw boaters a summer style and felt Homburg and trilby hats growing fashionable in the 1910s and 1920s.