Hats: Are trilby's and fedora's making a comeback?

Over the last few years Hollywood has been incorporating hats, most notably the trilby and the fedora into popular TV shows.

Both the trilby and fedora hats originated from plays. The Trilby came from the play based on George du Maurier’s 1894 novel “Trilby.” And the Fedora hat originated from an 1882 French play “Fedora.”

Jane Timoney (Maria Bello) of Prime Suspect - trilby

The trilby and fedora ended up replacing the bowler and the homburg as the men’s hat in the early 1900’s. But by the mid-1960’s people started to lose interest in the hats. They were seen as stuffy, a hat your grandfather would wear, by teens and twenty-year-olds who were trying to break away from early 20th Century traditions.

Neal Caffrey (Matthew Bomer) of White Collar - fedora

Today baseball style hats have been the most common for the last fifty years especially in the United States.

But old has a way of becoming new again.

People like to follow celebrities and their favorite TV and movie characters, where they eat, what they drive and what they are wearing.

Nathan Ford (Timothy Hutton) of Leverage - fedora

In recent years shows to include trilby and fedora hats into their characters wardrobe have been, Prime Suspect, White Collar, Leverage, Caprica and Homicide: Life on the Street.

If you search online for either of the two hats as worn by the characters you will discover blogs and Facebook pages of people asking where they can find these hats for themselves.

On Facebook the “Neal Caffrey’s Hat Appreciation Society” page allows people to post comments and ask where they can buy a fedora like the one Matthew Bomer’s character wears.

Joseph Adama (Esai Morales) and Samuel Adama (Sasha Roiz) of Caprica - trilby

Just recently I came across an 11-year-old wearing a Trilby. I asked him about the hat and he said he thought it look cool on him. He’s mother told me, her son has been wearing the hat nonstop for almost a year. As the boy rolled off on his inline skateboard joined by his mother I actually thought to myself, he looked like a young version of Neal Caffrey, from the TV show White Collar.

I’ve thought about wearing a hat a time or two, but ball caps never looked good on me. Maybe I should give a trilby or fedora a try.

Related articles
Fedora vs Trilby (fashish.com)
1 Trend, 3 Ways: Mini Straw Fedoras (celebritybabies.people.com)
Villagehats’s Blog (villagehats.wordpress.com)
The Fedora or Trilby Hat (hatsandcaps.co.uk)

---

About these ads