Style Seems Circular

A discovery. In a hat box.

In case you were wondering after reading my last little bit of rambling nonsense, I bought the hat.

Now the hat’s quite a lot different than most, and not only because of its sage green color. The crown is also shaped into what’s called a “Brick” style instead of the vastly more common “Cattleman’s” crease. It’s also rough in finish, maybe what I’d call furry, or fuzzy. They call that a “Buffalo” style finish, and it results from not sanding the hat as is normally done. All the millions of stray hairs are allowed to stick up as they want, rather than being cut off to perfect smoothness.

So, that’s the hat.

It’s pretty odd, but I like it.

Here’s a wee bit of super sexy hat porn for you:

Breakin’ it in.

The thing is, while I was picking it up, I had Mrs. Bailey with me. (Why she didn’t snag her .357 Magnum and shoot me dead before I could buy yet another hat is a total mystery to me. After all, the chest freezer is empty at the moment, so she’d have a place to store the body.)

Now, Mrs. Bailey is not a lover of fine hats. Indeed I think that she believes the entire thing to be idiotic. But, alas, I do try to teach her about these most wonderful things.

The claim from hat manufacturers is that you can tell the quality of a cowboy hat by the number of X’s they mark in the hat. That would be true if those same manufacturers didn’t inflate their X’s faster than the Mexican Peso circa the mid 1990’s.

Back in the good old days it was a rule of thumb that for example a 4X hat from a reputable manufacturer would be made of 40% beaver fur. A 10X hat would therefore be pure beaver. That hasn’t been the case for more decades than I can count. We’ve got 1000X hats now days. The X system is so degraded that it has become complete nonsense. All you can figure is that the higher X count hat from a specific manufacturer will be better than a lower X count hat from that same manufacturer. Up to a point of course. Once a hat is 100% beaver, it can’t get any better, no matter how many X’s some lunatic with a stamping machine down in Texas adds to the thing.

But, none of that matters. It doesn’t matter in the slightest.

Because you can very easily tell the quality of a hat, simply by touching the hat. That pure beaver hat will feel radically different than a hat with zero beaver and a handful of wool in the mix. Even though both hats might look exactly the same sitting on the store’s shelf.

So, I took the opportunity to teach Mrs. Bailey how to judge the quality of a hat, from the feel of a hat. I figure that having this knowledge will come in super handy for her when she finally comes to understand just how amazing an addiction to fine hats can be!

The store had a couple of beautiful Stetsons sitting right next to each other. One grey, one brown. The grey one was made out of some ungodly unsuitable blend of felted junk, undoubtedly with a fair bit of wool thrown into the mix. Damn if it wasn’t pretty though. The brown one sitting next to it was 100% fur felt, most likely 100% rabbit without a shred of beaver fur in sight. Undoubtedly the brown hat was of tremendously higher quality than the grey, despite them both looking great.

So, I suggested that she run a fingertip over both, so that she could see how easy it is to tell the difference between a good (not great) hat and a bad hat.

She understood after doing so.

She may deny it, and continue to lie to herself about the whole hat thing being yet another of her husband’s misguided delusions, but I know that deep down she’ll treasure having this important knowledge for the rest of her life.

But none of that is what I’ve come here to write about today.

No siree.

Nope. Today I want to write about fashion and style.

A very long time ago, (something like 1985) in a far away land, (somewhere like St. Joseph, Missouri) I visited the Stetson hat factory and snagged me my first good cowboy hat. This during a trip with the Future Farmers of America.

The thing is, that cowboy hat didn’t look much at all like the cowboy hats seen today. The brim was narrower, the crown was higher, the brim’s angle was radically tighter. The style was just completely different.

Because it isn’t just in Paris and New York that styles change, it’s everywhere. Popular cowboy hat styles today are different than they were in the 1980’s those were different than they were in the 1960’s. Fashion changes.

But that brand spankin’ new brown hat that I encouraged Mrs. Bailey to fondle like a lover looked to be shaped and styled a heck of a lot more like my hat in 1985 than the hats seen most often today. It seems that the old styles must be making a return.

Now today I was faced with a hat problem. Two problems actually, but we’ll focus on just one.

You see, owning the big new green hat means that I also now own a great big new hat box to keep it in. And where in the hell am I going to stuff another big hat box inside this house?

So, I had to go to the closet stuffed with cowboy hats. I pulled all the hat boxes out of there, in order to organize things enough to fit yet another hat box in there. Let me tell ya’ it’s quite an ordeal.

But, it wasn’t all bad, because I got to open all those hat boxes to once again see the treasures they contained.

I’ve got a shirttail relative, quite a lot older than me, and he worked on horseback in the 1970’s. He did that in a particularly windy part of Eastern Oregon. It seems that, back then, he bought a super quality Resistol, and had it shaped into what’s called a “Taco” so that it wouldn’t blow off in the wind. Well, I guess the hat never really fit him quite right, so he never wore it, and I ended up with it, maybe twenty years ago.

Let me tell you, that hat (I relaxed the “Taco” a bit once it came home with me) is pretty much exactly the same in style as that brand spankin’ new, height of current fashion, hat sitting on the shelf over at the big western wear store.

It’s funny how these styles always seem to come back around.

And this is all a good reminder that the old always becomes somehow new again.

All I can hope at this point is that the polyester leisure suit never comes back!