STATUS OF THE HAT.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 60, Issue 248, 27 July 1940, Page 4

STATUS OF THE HAT.

We have often been told about Hat "Week and now we arc to have a Hat Week, notes “The Times.” This very week is to be devoted in London to a “Hat Drive” in order to educate the public, in the importance of hats both socially and in business. No doubt the status of the hat is not what it once was. It is more than a hundred years since East told Tom Brown, on his first appearance at Rugby, that “only the louts wear caps” and expressed himself as wholly unable to imagine what would happen if Tom went into the quadrangle “with that thing on.” Since then the cap has been steadily ousting the hat for many purposes. William Lillywhite bowled in a hat; his successors of the All England eleven in the dags of WLG.’s boyhood wore curious little billycocks; the cricketer of to-dav and of many days past has had a cap. But—and here in its turn the cap has had a fall—he does not bowl in it ; in fact, he does little else in it save pose for a photographic group. So far as youth is concerned all headgear has become a drug in the market, and this is the state of things which Hat Week sets out to remedy. The time is at least auspicious in that far more youthful heads are covered than for a long time past. Whether ho be a sailor or a soldier or an airman the young man in uniform must wear something on his head. He wears it with a very proper pride and has doubtless been informed by admiring female relatives and friends that it is exceedingly becoming. It must bo the business of the promoters of this drive to make him permanently hat-conscious so that lie will not return to his bad old habits when he is a civilian once more.