The Pre-tricorn Era
This was where hats were going before the population started pinning the brim up:
Which could only lead to this sort of thing:
which, though fine for a portrait, would clearly flop down and generally obscure your vision when galloping through Epping Forest, on a sweating mare, in hot pursuit of the 10:15 from Colchester.
So who was it that first pinned a brim up? Someone must have been first. Someone must have been perhaps struggling to light the fire, their brim getting the way and them knocking it back with a casual back-handed gesture, then it flopping down again blowing the matches out until they got fed up and set to with a needle and thread.
Did they get ridiculed in the street? Did their friends stop buying them drinks in the pub? Did their wife refuse to sleep with them? You bet - it is a hard life for a fashion-monger. But eventually the efficacy of their needlework became apparent and, like a careless match discarded in the Australian Outback, it caught on and spread - from London, England to the New World.
rare colour photograph of American Minutemen preparing for the War of Independance
And did your man receive a penny for his troubles? Nah. He sat in the corner of the pub muttering to himself under his breath "mmnnnarrgg I thought of that mmmnn rrrrr" and he continued to be ridiculed, not bought drinks, and not get laid.
[And Thomas Dolby didn't invent that noise reduction system by the way.]
Which could only lead to this sort of thing:
which, though fine for a portrait, would clearly flop down and generally obscure your vision when galloping through Epping Forest, on a sweating mare, in hot pursuit of the 10:15 from Colchester.
So who was it that first pinned a brim up? Someone must have been first. Someone must have been perhaps struggling to light the fire, their brim getting the way and them knocking it back with a casual back-handed gesture, then it flopping down again blowing the matches out until they got fed up and set to with a needle and thread.
Did they get ridiculed in the street? Did their friends stop buying them drinks in the pub? Did their wife refuse to sleep with them? You bet - it is a hard life for a fashion-monger. But eventually the efficacy of their needlework became apparent and, like a careless match discarded in the Australian Outback, it caught on and spread - from London, England to the New World.
rare colour photograph of American Minutemen preparing for the War of Independance
And did your man receive a penny for his troubles? Nah. He sat in the corner of the pub muttering to himself under his breath "mmnnnarrgg I thought of that mmmnn rrrrr" and he continued to be ridiculed, not bought drinks, and not get laid.
[And Thomas Dolby didn't invent that noise reduction system by the way.]
posted by John | 5:47 pm
2 Comments:
Surely the way to win wars in this era was NOT to wear this kind of hat at all. No wonder the American soldiers in your early photograph look a bit puzzled - surely any kind of charge, whether on foot or on horseback, would have got them about four yards before they all ran back again to pick their hats up.
Has any research been done into this, I wonder? The earlier invention of the bobble hat could have changed the course of history.
I think the turning point came in 1854 during the Battle of Balaklava.
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