Effortless Style: The Bowler Hat Through History

hi on the history guy and if you didn't know in addition to our channel on YouTube we also have a page on patreon where for just $1 a month you can support the work of the history guide and also get all of our content to advertising free in addition patrons on patreon get access to one exclusive video a month that has made just for patrons on patreon and for the last year and a half that's been a series on the history guys hats and every once in a while we're traveling were able to bring one of those episodes here to the YouTube audience today I'm going to talk about a hat that became famous in England where it was created but had a huge impact across the pond and icon of entertainment culture and a British gentleman if you enjoyed the episode please consider becoming a patron on patreon you know my collection is mostly military hats I think that's what I'm known for but it's not the only kind of hat that I collect and today I'm going to talk about a hat that's really a fashion hat in fact a hat that has been in fashion for a surprisingly long time and used in a surprising number of situations this is the kind of hat that's called a bowler hat or in the United States it's sometimes referred to as a derby hat it's more associated with the United Kingdom but it was also very popular in the United States played an important role in American history and fact this particular hat is made by an American company the Mallory company which purports to be the oldest hat maker in the United States and is more known for inventing another style of hat called the fedora I don't really know how old this hat is my guess is sometimes early in the last century at least prior to the 1940s when the Mallory company was acquired by the Stetson company according to the label it was made for the Russell clothing store which is in Byron Ohio which doesn't appear to be in business anymore and unfortunately for me this wonderful clean collectible hat too small for my head the bowler is an incredibly well-known hat design worn by for example future presidents and future prime ministers the history of the bowler goes back to 1849 and Thomas William cook the 2nd earl of luster Cooke owned a large estate in Norfolk called Holcomb and had gamekeepers taken care of the game on the large estate the game keepers had been wearing top hats as part of their uniform but riding and top hats was problematic they were knocked off by branches and wind and we're prone to bend or crumple when they fell the arrow was tired of having to buy new hats cooks younger brother Edward went to James locking company of st. James Street in London which is still in business today and bills itself as the world's oldest hat shop Edward cook asked the company to make it happen it was tight-fitting to the head would stay on the wearer's head and would provide some protection the protection was from branches but also the idea might have been to provide some protection of the Earl's gamekeepers should they run into poachers walking company engaged to London hat makers Thomas and William bowler to build the custom hat design now a bowler hat is made out of felt and felt is an unwilling fabric what that means is that felt takes fibers in the case of a bowler hat usually wool fibers it soaks them in chemicals until the fibers flatten out and can be squeezed together to make a cloth that then can be pressed into several different kinds of forms and one of the chemicals that is typically used in the making of felt is mercury and constantly breathing those mercury fumes is what led to both the phenomena and the phrase mad as a hatter felt is then using a combination of heat moisture and pressure shaped on a hat form and the bowler brothers added something else for the new hat design they added animal fat although the exact formula is still a mystery the fad formed a sort of glue that would combined with the ball shaped design made the Hat very hard according to legend when Edward Cooke returned to get the Hat he first dropped it in the street and stomped on it twice and saying that it stood up to the punishment was satisfied with its strength and paid 12 shillings for it this is his brother the Earl wearing the famous hat designed for him and these are his game keepers resting in their bowler hats the head is still sometimes referred to as a Billy or Bob hat in honor of Sir William game keepers at hokum still where Billy Cox but it was the bowler brothers who started mass-producing the design and thus the name the bowler hat the bowler actually had several variations but it is basically described as having a bowl shaped top with a small slightly upturned brim the bowl can be relatively high or low although the Hat was originally designed to conform tightly to the head they are made in many colors but most often made a black wool felt one interesting thing about the bowler is that was originally very much a working-class hat the same characteristics that Sir William had desired made it useful for miners and railway and factory workers it was close fitting provided protection from elements and some against injury was inexpensive and it stayed on your head in fact traditionally the way that a railway worker knew that a bowler hat fit correctly was to stick their head out of the window of a moving train and if the Hat stayed on then it was a correct fit the Hat came to the United States in an interesting way in 1778 Edward Smith Stanley the twelfth Earl of Derby held a sweepstakes horse race on his estate called the Oaks the race was called the oak Stakes but starting the following year became known as the Derby Stakes the turn Derby has become a general turn traditionally used strictly to refer to races restricted to three-year-olds which of course a current example being the Kentucky Derby the bowler was a particularly good hat for horse racing fans because of its characteristic of not blowing off while say riding a horse and so America's introduction to the bowler hat was as the hat that was worn at a Derby literally a Derby hat and so in America I had designed for one English Earl is named after another English Earl who died before that hat was even invented one of the many ways in which Hollywood has misrepresented the Wild West is in its fashion to believe Tom makes the West's one with men and 10-gallon hats in actuality while the traditionally wide brim cowboy hat was used the Derby was much more practical it was in fact literally designed to not fall off while riding a horse the Derby rather than the sombrero or cowboy hat was the most popular hat in the Wild West so much so that author and historian Lucius be described it as the hat that won the West the Hat was used by some of the most famous characters of the West notorious outlaw Butch Cassidy and his gang the Wild Bunch famous lawmen and later sportswriter Bat Masterson and stagecoach Robert Charles Bowles better known as Black Bart in fact one notorious robber named Marion Hedgepeth a hired gun often described as one of the fastest guns in the Wild West was so fond of the Hat that he was known as the Derby kid the bowler hat has become a cultural icon in many ways it was the signature style for comedians Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy and Bud Abbott and Lou Costello it was a defining part of the costume of Charlie Chaplin's character the considered whether most important figures in the history of the film industry the Hat was so iconic that the bowler hat and cane that Chaplin used in the 1915 film The Little sold at auction for sixty two thousand five hundred dollars in 2012 the characters in Samuel Beckett's 1953 play Waiting for Godot but are the most significant english-language play of the 20th century in a British poll in 1990 are usually portrayed wearing bowler hats Alex de large the chilling main character in Stanley Kubrick's influential 1971 dystopian film a Clockwork Orange wears a bowler hat as did dapper spy John Steed in the 1960s stylish espionage crime drama series The Avengers bowler Waring J Willington wimpy will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today the bowler is so ubiquitous that famous people from heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson - movie star Al Jolson two inventors Orville and Wilbur Wright - world-renowned explorer Roald Amundsen - Enrico Caruso one of the most famous operatic tenors of all time have all been famously photographed in a bowler hat in an odd twist in the early 20th century the Hat that was designed for utility for the working class became associated with the banking class the classic stereotype of the London City gent included a bowler and an umbrella with business attire was popular into the 1970s although it declined thereafter his Styles became less formal the British bank Bradford & Bingley so associated its brand with the bowler hat that they had more than a hundred separate trademarks using bowler hats when the bank broke up in 2008 one of the significant points of contention was which entity would keep the trademarks one of the most famous portrayals of the city gent banker was actor david Tomlinson's mr. banks in the 1964 film Mary Poppins because of its association with the English the Hat is often used by loyalist fraternities such as the Orange Order in Northern Ireland and Scotland in the 1920s railroad workers from England brought the hat to Bolivia where it was adopted by the native population now bowler is called a bomb beam in Spanish a considered part of the traditional dress by Quechua and Aymara women cavalry officers in the British Army wear bowler hats for their annual parade in Hyde Park on what is known as cavalry Sunday in May and officers are still expected to wear their city jente tyre whenever they are in London on duty since 18-49 the humble bowler has decorated the heads of kings and queens and clowns and criminals and the day of the board has not passed for example bowlers figure prominently in the fashion of the steam punk subculture in 2016 the venerable locke and company reported a spike in the sale of bowler hats the hat that was designed 170 years ago for gamekeepers still represents what they call effortless style I hope you enjoyed this episode of the history guy short snippets have forgotten history between 10 and 15 minutes long and if you did enjoy please go ahead and click that thumbs up button if you have any questions or comments or suggestions for future episodes please write those in the comment section I will be happy to personally respond be sure to follow the history guy on Facebook Instagram Twitter and check out 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Channel: The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered

Views: 136,540

Keywords: history, the history guy, hats, fashion history, bowler, derby

Id: AKV0kFCnWbs

Length: 10min 30sec (630 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 22 2019