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[POST_BYLINE]By Douglas Brown<QC>
<MC>Denver Post Staff Writer<QC>
[TEXT_RR]He's out of money, headed to jail, loathed and ridiculed by many
people who used to call him pal.
But one thing former Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff has going for him: a
good hat.
He donned the black fedora with its creased crown and gently angled brim for
his post-courthouse voyage through a media gantlet one recent gray day in
the District of Columbia.
Abramoff made a blizzard of bad decisions during the 21st century; flopping
a ballcap on his head for his D.C. court appearance, blessedly, was not one
of them.
He saved that moronic move for the next day, when he exited a Florida
courtroom.
From serious man in serious trouble to knucklehead yahoo in serious trouble,
in the space of two days.
You should have stuck with the fedora, Jack.
Back when men always wore suits, men wore honest hats instead of
advertisements. Fedoras and trilbys, Panamas, derbys and homburgs; fur felt
and silk, feathers and herringbone.
Now, men head out for a night at the movies wearing T-shirts celebrating
Starbucks, and ballcaps shilling for Office Depot.
The sad ballcap has its proper place - in the garden, on the running trail,
speckling the ballfield. But like an alien, invasive weed, it's rooted far
beyond its native soil, and nearly vanquished the more dashing and
complicated hats that once flourished everywhere in America.
All men, however, have the power to reject the ballcap's sweet poison and
cover their heads with something else - something sharp, classy, adult.
First, though, a man in search of a hat must find a style. And then he must
find a hat. Neither task is necessarily easy unless the man elects to wear a
cowboy hat, a fine, storied category of lid with a range of styles. If
you're the kind of guy who likes cowboy hats and can pull off the look they
project, go for it.
Then there's the rest of us.
I started wearing fedoras now and again after my grandfather died and I
found a stash of his hats.
Gramps would put on a suit and fit a handkerchief in his breast pocket to
drive to the grocery store for bread. Gramps looked like Dean Martin and
dealt poker in Las Vegas back when the freeways were lined with billboards
for Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and Liberace. Gramps wore fedoras.
I'm no Gramps. I'm not sure if people guffaw behind my back when I pass with
a fedora on my head and no complementary suit sheathing the rest of my body.
If they did, I might care.
For now, I'm comfortable with certain fedora styles, definitely not the
wide-brimmed "Indiana Jones" style, but instead fedoras with shorter brims -
even the the style with the shortest brim, referred to as "stingy brim" -
and "trilbys," an English hat that some people say is a fedora; trilbys have
short brims and tapered crowns.<NO1>cq<NO>
[SUBHED]Back in style
[/SUBHED]Fedoras, especially the short-brim styles, are appearing in public
again, with celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Justin Timberlake and Donell
Jones routinely wearing them. For the most part, these fellas aren't pairing
suits with fedoras.
At The Fedora Lounge (www.thefedoralounge.com), a 2-year-old discussion
board for lovers of men's hats, membership is growing by about 200 people a
month, says Michael Key, who started the site.
Just months ago, he says, the site had several hundred members, but now it's
up to 1,600.
"I think people are getting a little bit tired of the tacky slob look," he
says. "There's a certain move towards people having a more glamorous look."
For generations, he says, top hats were formalwear and bowlers, derbys and
homburgs were considered casual. Early in the 20th century the boater hat -
the kind of straw hat guys in barbershop quartets wear - claimed the casual
look, and the homburgs, derbys and bowlers began to look more formal.
The fedora arrived somewhere in the 1920s, he says, and during the next
several decades it changed, starting out with a tall crown and a narrow
brim, having a wide brim and tall crown in the 1930s (the "Indiana Jones"
style), and then shrinking every decade until it was short and nearly
brimless in the 1960s.
It never was considered a stuffy hat, like homburgs and bowlers had become.
It faded nevertheless in the 1960s, an era that brought lots of rebellion by
young people against previous generations, a president from Massachusetts
who didn't often wear hats, and a lot of hair - hair that people wanted to
exhibit, hair that invited extreme hat-head.
Many men's hats went subterranean for decades. When they returned, they were
ballcaps.
The fedora may have slipped into the shadows, but it didn't die.
It's "a versatile hat, it fits into all of those camps (of formal and
casual)," says Key. "That's one of the reasons it has remained popular."
[SUBHED]Iconic look
[/SUBHED]The persistence of the fedora can be traced, too, to its
identification with Hollywood icons like Humphrey Bogart and with the classy
and sophisticated Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s.
The fedora looked great on those guys, and some contemporary men say hey, if
it worked then, why not now?
That's the idea behind Jim Boatright's embrace of the fedora. Boatright, 64,
of Golden, a retired Lockheed Martin engineer, always wore hats, but his
fondness for them increased after he retired, about five years ago. Now,
he's got about 40 hats, many of them fedoras, some of them custom-made.
"Knowing you have a Borsalino on your head gives you a sense of pride, a
sense of style, especially with all of these yokels wearing ballcaps," he
says.
Watching old movies, he says, stoked his passion for fedoras. Now, he never
goes hatless when he's outside.
Boatright, a Fedora Lounge participant, hunts for hats on eBay and works
with custom hatters around the country. In just the past six months, he's
noticed a significant jump in fedora interest. In the summer, he paid $30
for a splendid gray Stetson Whippet fedora on eBay, a vintage hat that was
probably made in the 1940s.
He recently bid on another one, but didn't buy it. The Whippet sold for more
than $120.
[SUBHED]The hat hunt
[/SUBHED]Boatright pokes around on eBay for hats, but one thing he doesn't
do is shop for them in Denver.
The best hats, he says, were made generations ago. They were stitched
together instead of glued and their felt was made out of beaver fur. The
only contemporary hats approaching that quality are custom-made by a handful
of hatters still in business around the country.
Hats like these, he says, can't be bought in stores in many cities.
For a Front Range guy just dipping a toe into hatland, a guy who doesn't
want to muck around on eBay or spend $350 for a basic custom hat, there are
options.
One of them is Ted's Clothiers in downtown Englewood, which has been selling
men's clothes for more than 30 years.
Lined up along the front window and stacked throughout the store: fedoras,
Irish caps, tweed rain caps, bowlers - about 40 different hats in all.
Few of them would please hat connoisseurs. Most of us, however, would
probably find something cool.
"We try to carry all types of hats for all types of people," says store
employee Chris Vasilas. "Sometimes you have to pry that baseball cap off
their heads before they try something else."
Irish caps or "driving caps" are one of the most popular categories, and the
store now sells out of fedoras every season.
They started selling hats only a few years ago, when they expanded the
store, says Ted Vasilas, the shop owner. They weren't sure how the hats
would sell.
They did.
"It's the best thing I ever did for my store," says Ted Vasilas. "People
come from all over for the hats."
[TAGLINE]Staff writer Douglas Brown can be reached at 303-820-1395 or
djbrown@denverpost.com.
:cheers1:
[POST_BYLINE]By Douglas Brown<QC>
<MC>Denver Post Staff Writer<QC>
[TEXT_RR]He's out of money, headed to jail, loathed and ridiculed by many
people who used to call him pal.
But one thing former Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff has going for him: a
good hat.
He donned the black fedora with its creased crown and gently angled brim for
his post-courthouse voyage through a media gantlet one recent gray day in
the District of Columbia.
Abramoff made a blizzard of bad decisions during the 21st century; flopping
a ballcap on his head for his D.C. court appearance, blessedly, was not one
of them.
He saved that moronic move for the next day, when he exited a Florida
courtroom.
From serious man in serious trouble to knucklehead yahoo in serious trouble,
in the space of two days.
You should have stuck with the fedora, Jack.
Back when men always wore suits, men wore honest hats instead of
advertisements. Fedoras and trilbys, Panamas, derbys and homburgs; fur felt
and silk, feathers and herringbone.
Now, men head out for a night at the movies wearing T-shirts celebrating
Starbucks, and ballcaps shilling for Office Depot.
The sad ballcap has its proper place - in the garden, on the running trail,
speckling the ballfield. But like an alien, invasive weed, it's rooted far
beyond its native soil, and nearly vanquished the more dashing and
complicated hats that once flourished everywhere in America.
All men, however, have the power to reject the ballcap's sweet poison and
cover their heads with something else - something sharp, classy, adult.
First, though, a man in search of a hat must find a style. And then he must
find a hat. Neither task is necessarily easy unless the man elects to wear a
cowboy hat, a fine, storied category of lid with a range of styles. If
you're the kind of guy who likes cowboy hats and can pull off the look they
project, go for it.
Then there's the rest of us.
I started wearing fedoras now and again after my grandfather died and I
found a stash of his hats.
Gramps would put on a suit and fit a handkerchief in his breast pocket to
drive to the grocery store for bread. Gramps looked like Dean Martin and
dealt poker in Las Vegas back when the freeways were lined with billboards
for Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and Liberace. Gramps wore fedoras.
I'm no Gramps. I'm not sure if people guffaw behind my back when I pass with
a fedora on my head and no complementary suit sheathing the rest of my body.
If they did, I might care.
For now, I'm comfortable with certain fedora styles, definitely not the
wide-brimmed "Indiana Jones" style, but instead fedoras with shorter brims -
even the the style with the shortest brim, referred to as "stingy brim" -
and "trilbys," an English hat that some people say is a fedora; trilbys have
short brims and tapered crowns.<NO1>cq<NO>
[SUBHED]Back in style
[/SUBHED]Fedoras, especially the short-brim styles, are appearing in public
again, with celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Justin Timberlake and Donell
Jones routinely wearing them. For the most part, these fellas aren't pairing
suits with fedoras.
At The Fedora Lounge (www.thefedoralounge.com), a 2-year-old discussion
board for lovers of men's hats, membership is growing by about 200 people a
month, says Michael Key, who started the site.
Just months ago, he says, the site had several hundred members, but now it's
up to 1,600.
"I think people are getting a little bit tired of the tacky slob look," he
says. "There's a certain move towards people having a more glamorous look."
For generations, he says, top hats were formalwear and bowlers, derbys and
homburgs were considered casual. Early in the 20th century the boater hat -
the kind of straw hat guys in barbershop quartets wear - claimed the casual
look, and the homburgs, derbys and bowlers began to look more formal.
The fedora arrived somewhere in the 1920s, he says, and during the next
several decades it changed, starting out with a tall crown and a narrow
brim, having a wide brim and tall crown in the 1930s (the "Indiana Jones"
style), and then shrinking every decade until it was short and nearly
brimless in the 1960s.
It never was considered a stuffy hat, like homburgs and bowlers had become.
It faded nevertheless in the 1960s, an era that brought lots of rebellion by
young people against previous generations, a president from Massachusetts
who didn't often wear hats, and a lot of hair - hair that people wanted to
exhibit, hair that invited extreme hat-head.
Many men's hats went subterranean for decades. When they returned, they were
ballcaps.
The fedora may have slipped into the shadows, but it didn't die.
It's "a versatile hat, it fits into all of those camps (of formal and
casual)," says Key. "That's one of the reasons it has remained popular."
[SUBHED]Iconic look
[/SUBHED]The persistence of the fedora can be traced, too, to its
identification with Hollywood icons like Humphrey Bogart and with the classy
and sophisticated Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s.
The fedora looked great on those guys, and some contemporary men say hey, if
it worked then, why not now?
That's the idea behind Jim Boatright's embrace of the fedora. Boatright, 64,
of Golden, a retired Lockheed Martin engineer, always wore hats, but his
fondness for them increased after he retired, about five years ago. Now,
he's got about 40 hats, many of them fedoras, some of them custom-made.
"Knowing you have a Borsalino on your head gives you a sense of pride, a
sense of style, especially with all of these yokels wearing ballcaps," he
says.
Watching old movies, he says, stoked his passion for fedoras. Now, he never
goes hatless when he's outside.
Boatright, a Fedora Lounge participant, hunts for hats on eBay and works
with custom hatters around the country. In just the past six months, he's
noticed a significant jump in fedora interest. In the summer, he paid $30
for a splendid gray Stetson Whippet fedora on eBay, a vintage hat that was
probably made in the 1940s.
He recently bid on another one, but didn't buy it. The Whippet sold for more
than $120.
[SUBHED]The hat hunt
[/SUBHED]Boatright pokes around on eBay for hats, but one thing he doesn't
do is shop for them in Denver.
The best hats, he says, were made generations ago. They were stitched
together instead of glued and their felt was made out of beaver fur. The
only contemporary hats approaching that quality are custom-made by a handful
of hatters still in business around the country.
Hats like these, he says, can't be bought in stores in many cities.
For a Front Range guy just dipping a toe into hatland, a guy who doesn't
want to muck around on eBay or spend $350 for a basic custom hat, there are
options.
One of them is Ted's Clothiers in downtown Englewood, which has been selling
men's clothes for more than 30 years.
Lined up along the front window and stacked throughout the store: fedoras,
Irish caps, tweed rain caps, bowlers - about 40 different hats in all.
Few of them would please hat connoisseurs. Most of us, however, would
probably find something cool.
"We try to carry all types of hats for all types of people," says store
employee Chris Vasilas. "Sometimes you have to pry that baseball cap off
their heads before they try something else."
Irish caps or "driving caps" are one of the most popular categories, and the
store now sells out of fedoras every season.
They started selling hats only a few years ago, when they expanded the
store, says Ted Vasilas, the shop owner. They weren't sure how the hats
would sell.
They did.
"It's the best thing I ever did for my store," says Ted Vasilas. "People
come from all over for the hats."
[TAGLINE]Staff writer Douglas Brown can be reached at 303-820-1395 or
djbrown@denverpost.com.
:cheers1:
