Long ago, some intrepid warrior made his first kill and announced it to the world by plucking a feather and sticking it in his headband. Hence the archaic phrase of congratulations, “Put a Feather in Your Cap,” which just goes to show you how important hats can be. Picture this: a prototype homo sapiens ties a piece of hide to his head to protect himself from frigid rains. He sees a colorful rock on the ground, takes a fancy to it, carries it back to his cave, and sticks it into his makeshift cap. Why? Because now his flap of leather looks better than all the other head wraps in the cave. Take warning, Gentlemen. The thing you wear on your head, from toupee to sports cap, tells the world more about you than you may suspect. Let’s focus awhile on male headdresses throughout Europe and the New World after the fall of the Roman Empire. There’s not much to say about Roman headgear other than their helmets; Roman Emperors wore Laurel wreaths on their heads, so what did they know? Later on, though, pick a time, pick a place. What did the Big Shots wear? Huge, honking confections made of the finest materials, bird plumage, and jewels that money could buy. The more important your status, the fancier your chapeau. Tradesmen and villagers had to make do with scarves, berets, tams, fezzes and their ilk, but the moment a man rose in rank was the moment he pronounced it to the world by abandoning his former head coverings and donning the true symbol of status: his bigger, better, fancier, more expensive hat. The same applied for wigs, hence the term “Mr. Big Wig.” For men, hats mattered then and they still matter today. Try wearing an L.A. Rams cap to a Chicago Bears game and see what happens. I know a man who wears a Fedora at work to cover up his yarmulke so he won’t get beaten up in East L.A.. Think about the hazard of walking into gang territory wearing the wrong colored cap. Seriously, a man’s hat can trigger a life or death chase. Consider military helmets. They were invented to save lives, so they certainly are utilitarian, yet how did the enemy know to target the Commander? They just needed to look for the tallest plumes, the gaudiest embellishments, or the biggest metal spikes. Sartorial splendor reigned supreme on the battlefield as well as in society, that is before we invented atomic bombs. Rank. Standing. Wealth. Dominance. Superiority. Name it and pick an era. The man’s hat will be your first first and final clue for every class, caste, and seniority in the pecking order. Perhaps that seems old fashioned. Maybe the only true hats you’ve seen were in black and white films, but just wait. What goes around, comes around and so will your Fedora, your Stetson, your Hamburg, Beret, Bowler, Boater, and Flat Cap. Further, once you put it on your head and step outside, it will reveal more about you than you care to imagine. Regardless of the cut of your coat, the cost of your shoes, the leather of your jacket, it’s your headgear, Gentlemen, that reveal how you see yourself and how the world sees you. Hats matter. With women, it may be a little different. Yes, the Queen gets to wear a twenty-pound diamond studded crown, but for the rest of us I believe the true attraction of the hat stems less from status and more from vanity. A woman’s hat is the pièce de résistance, the finishing touch to an elegant toilette. Gone are the days when we would have been shunned had we appeared in public bareheaded. But you must never underestimate the power of the hat to resurface in the most insidious ways. At the moment, we’re not wearing hats per se. We wear little bits of fluff, netting, and sparkles called Fascinators. These desirable bits of nonsense sit precariously at either side of our foreheads, sticking out at strange angles and doing nothing whatsoever to shelter us from the elements. They are held in place by the same plastic or metal headbands we wore when we were five. I own three. How many do you have? If not a Fascinator, surely you own a knit cap. Confess now, how many knit or woolen caps fill your wardrobe? They are undoubtedly practical bits of weather protection, but don’t you mull over the selections before you make a purchase and choose the one that suits your mood? Utility needs to be available in at least four different colors and styles where women are concerned. I’d also like to point out that wrapping one’s head with three or more scarves of differing hues and patterns and topping them off with one or more bands of colored beads has turned modest head covering into a twenty-first century hat art form. My personal favorites are Big Hats. You will find them now at annual horse racing affairs, tea parties, and some church weddings. Today’s Big Hats are generally built in a one-size-fits-all model layered with fabric, floral arrangements, bows, faux fruit, trailing ribbons, you name it. Anything goes as long as it weighs next to nothing. Modern Big Hats have to be lightweight for two reasons. First, the one-size-fits-all is a lie. If they are not too big, they are too small. Either way, they are going to fall off your head if you don’t anchor them with bobby pins. Secondly, we’re not used to wearing traditionally-made Big Hats anymore and our necks muscles have atrophied. I know women who wear authentic Big Hats to historic reenactment events and either have to remove them after three hours to relieve migraines caused by barbell weights on their heads or have to go to the chiropractor the following week to get their neck vertebrae realigned. Think about the millinery masterpieces you see in moving pictures from the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris or the movie “Titanic.” Now, those were some hats! We’re talking entire-vasefuls-of-flowers-balanced-on the-brim hats. Half-the-village-picnic-fruit-arranged-on-the-head hats. Upended-waterfall hats. They were magnificent. They were a reason to get dressed and go outside. We should be so lucky as to be able to wear those hats today, but alas we cannot. Why not? Aside from neck atrophy, we lack the twenty pounds of hair that was piled into a structure sturdy enough to support hat tonnage and was thick enough to allow 14 inch death pins—I mean hat pins—to pierce one side of the hat, slip through the hairdo, and emerge at the other side without spilling blood in the process. Did you know that women used to go to their milliner’s shops so the hat maker could measure their hair and build a new creation with a hole inside the crown barely wide enough to plop over the lady’s chignon? Do you think those women in 1900 could balance their Big Hats without props and trestles? No way. Neither can we. That’s why we hold our heads funny when we play dress-up and wear a Big Hat to tea or the race track. That’s why we are often are seen with one hand holding onto our dear adornments so they won’t fly off as the thoroughbreds speed past. That’s why modern Big Hats have to be constructed of featherweight findings. Now do you see why Fascinators outsell Big Hats? We haven’t mentioned Cloche hats yet, have we? They were gorgeous in the 1920s and ’30s and they are gorgeous now. Any of them. All of them. Gorgeous. Silk, felt, beribboned, plain, decorated: they’re all pretty and every woman looks good in them. Plus, they don’t take up as much closet space as a Big Hat or a really big Fascinator. So why don’t we see more of them? Cloches flatten our hair. If your hairstyle is straight, no problem. Buy a cloche. Flaunt it. But the rest of us who have to do a little teasing, lifting, and spraying…we have a problem. We can still wear a Cloche; we simply can’t remove it until we get home. It’s hard to manage a Big Hat. It’s deflating to wear a Cloche. It takes serious time to wrap our heads in a fancy tichel or turban. So in the end, do hats matter for women as much as they do for men? You bet they do. Why else would anyone have come up with as silly a solution as a Hatinator? Ladies, do what the men are doing. Wait a few years. Before you know it, no self respecting woman will leave the house without the mid-twenty-first century version of a hat. When that happens, just remember: whatever you wear on your head, make sure it matches your shoes.