To Get Ahead You Need A Hat. I May Have that the Wrong Way Round.

You don't see many people wearing hats nowadays.  That isn't a judgement necessarily, just an observation.  In some ways our largely hatless society is quite understandable.  A hat really is just one more thing to lose, particularly when convention dictates that it has to be removed when you go indoors, greet another or stop moving for any reason whatsoever.

Normally these days if someone is wearing a hat it is as a symbol of authority.  They're a police officer or a soldier or catholic archbishop or a circus ringmaster.  A hat is a way of separating the elect from the rest.  I have no idea why this should be so but like a good little blogger I will compensate for my ignorance with a combination of guesswork, dubious extrapolation and simply making shit up.

"Look at me!"  This is what a hat says.  "Look at me!  I am important!  Gaze upon my hatty magnificence and quail ye hatless lesser mortals!"  No matter what culture you look at the more prominent members of it seem to have been unable to resist the temptation to put weird shit on their heads.  There are some practical reasons of course.  In battle an ornate helmet made the army commander easy to identify.  This was certainly of great practical benefit to the enemy who knew exactly who to kill.  Despite this the habit persisted.  Additionally the higher your rank, the better the head wear and the more likely that your hairdo would survive if it rained.  But possibly the greatest benefit hat wearing bestowed was simple identification.  Upon meeting a new culture for the first time no ambassador/explorer/slave trader could go far wrong if they picked the most ornate head apparel and spoke to the person beneath it.  One tends to look at a person's head to identify them, if that head is decorated with something impressive then it can set the leader apart from the other smelly, dirty, flea ridden, sword wearing thugs hanging around the same location.

Possibly out of sheer perversity the Byzantines bucked this trend.  They identified their emperors by the purple boots which only the ruler was allowed to wear.  This meant that at a sit down dinner a foreign envoy would have to crawl under the table to find out which gorgeously robed arse he was supposed to be kissing.  At this point it is probably useful to mention that making foreigners feel awkward and uncomfortable was an integral part of Byzantine diplomacy.

Most rulers, however, were kinder (or possibly, less secure) and made it as easy as possible to identify them by slathering their heads with ornate decoration.  There was a practical use for this as well, in those uncertain times it made a lot of sense for the rulers to have their personal wealth accessible with no more effort than it takes to get dressed.  Naturally with the social success of the hat in all its variations the bandwagon was soon jumped on by those below the social level of king but who still wanted to emphasise the vast gulf between themselves and the labouring masses.  The labouring masses wore caps which were absolutely not the same thing as hats because caps are practical.  Practical clothing has never been a sign of social success.

As the human race limped arthritically towards modern times the respective political signals sent out by both hats and caps became simultaneously advanced and degraded.  As a general rule once somebody actually has to specifically state the political implications of something it is a sign that that something is on its way out.  This trend reached its apotheosis when various communist leaders presented themselves in public wearing what they fondly imagined were "workers" caps to emphasise their role as leaders of the proletariat.  These caps thus became a sort of hat because the message was unequivocal; "I am a leader, you can tell by my hat."  Wearing these caps (sorry, hats) was a public announcement that the wearer was such an absolute ruler that he didn't need to worry about the fact that he had lousy dress sense.  A pretty accurate statement really.

Nowadays very few people in our society wear hats.  It is normally reserved for places like the racecourse where the social obligation is to get incredibly drunk and throw up on the most expensive clothing you can provide yourself with.  Outside of such settings the usual reaction to someone wearing a hat is "hey, that person's wearing a hat".  There is however very little inclination to gather ones vassals and follow that person into battle.