Society: One takes one's hat off to Neil Steinberg: he has fashioned an intermittently fascinating book out of a highly unpromising subject.
Nowadays the sight of a hatted man convulses small boys and makes girl smirk, but there was a time when no self-respecting male would venture out of doors without the protection of a piece of headgear of one kind or another.
It was a serious business, in all senses of the term. Tens of thousands of people depended for a livelihood on the hat trade before its final collapse in the 1960s. In its heyday the United Hatters, Cap and Millinery Workers International Union had a membership of 100,000 - while, as Steinberg points out, "Men have been killed in the United States in living memory for wearing a straw hat out of season".
Popular mythology has it that president John F Kennedy was responsible for the death of the hat, but Steinberg is here to tell us that popular mythology is - as usual - wrong.
True, Kennedy, a compelling fashion icon, had a strong aversion to the hat, not least because this youthful and famously handsome president, as Steinberg observes, "looked older and almost unrecognisably ugly" when he wore one. However, hat manufacturing had been in a steep decline for decades before Kennedy was elected.
Steinberg, who seems to have read everything that was ever written about hats, pounces with gleeful disdain upon an article that appeared in the Detroit Free Press in 2000 - you see? everything - which stated that "Dress-hat sales tanked after John F Kennedy appeared hatless at his inauguration in 1960", thus, Steinberg observes, "managing to cram three major factual errors in a 15-word sentence".
Can you spot the mistakes? They are: 1. Dress-hat sales did not "tank" in 1960, but long before; 2. JFK did not appear hatless at his inauguration - in fact, he wore, or at least carried, a silk top hat; 3. The inauguration did not take place in 1960, but in January 1961. In fact, the peak year for the manufacture of men's hats in the United States was 1903, and by the middle of the 1920s "hatlessness was a major problem for the industry, which was in free-fall by the late 1940s and early 1950s".
Still, Steinberg does concede that Kennedy's brief reign in Camelot was a watershed in American life.
"The Kennedy era," he writes, "is a barrier beyond which lies an unexplored, often-forgotten world - a world that can be known by how and why men wore hats." And he adds, a touch defensively, "That is not as silly as it sounds".
Hats might at first seem a narrow lens through which to view Kennedy, but then so is his assassination, and 500 books have been published about that tragedy. Why shouldn't an aspect that he embraced - his choice to be hatless - reveal as much if not more about his life and his nation as the violent death imposed upon him? Kennedy and hats are a historical blip, yes, but also a moment in time, not when society changed, but when the public thought it had changed.
Steinberg's book, as might be expected, is a cornucopia spilling over with facts and fancies about men's hats. He spent a decade or so poring over books and documents in various libraries on both sides of the Atlantic, and talking to experts wise in the lore of the hat - and the riches he amassed are by turns mind-boggling, instructive, and funny.
Who would now believe that in the run-up to the 1960 election, Richard Nixon's "dark good looks" were cited by many women as their reason for supporting him against Kennedy, or that in the 1950s the hat-check franchise at New York's Waldorf Astoria hotel would have rented for $90,000 a year? And did you know that a "suit" was originally a jacket, "a shorter, less well-fitted garment than the tight frock coat", and was so called because unlike the frock coat it was matched to a man's trousers and waistcoat? And of course the hat is ubiquitous in popular sayings and metaphors, from the one that bluffers talk through to the one that one dares to throw into the ring.
Samuel Pepys, "the blunt English diarist", as Steinberg describes him, came across a vigorous figuration when in 1660 he dined with one of his lordly patrons and gossiped with him about the recent, hasty marriage of the Duke of York to his pregnant mistress. "My Lord told me," Pepys recorded, "that among his father's many old sayings that he had writ in a book of his, this is one: 'That he that doth get a wench with child and marries her afterwards is as if a man should shit in his hat and then clap it upon his head'."
Steinberg is an assiduous chronicler of the niceties and otherwise of hat-wearing etiquette. He notes, as others have before him, the odd fact that to chase after one's own hat when the wind blows it off is to appear a figure of fun, while to chase after another's hat in the same circumstances is to seem benevolent and even a little heroic.
As Mark Twain advises, "Never run after your own hat. Others will be delighted to do it; why spoil their fun?", while Dickens in The Pickwick Papers observes that, "There are few moments in a man's existence when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable consideration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat."
Perhaps the most weirdly interesting chapter in the book is the one devoted to the convention in the US in the early decades of the last century surrounding the wearing and putting off of men's summer straw hats. In particular, September 15th was the sacrosanct date after which "almost any man who wasn't the president of the United States and wore his summer straw risked a stranger knocking the hat off his head and jumping on it. Or worse." In the 1920s there were scenes of communal mayhem right across the US that would have gladdened the hearts of Laurel and Hardy in their anarchic mode:
The greatest unrest came in 1922, when a "straw hat smashing orgy" broke out in New York City from the Bronx to the Battery and went on for the better part of three days, as gangs of "young hoodlums", jumping the gun early, roamed their neighbourhoods, ripping straw hats off the heads of pedestrians and streetcar riders, trampling the hats and beating those who resisted.
As Steinberg goes on laconically to observe, "The risk of being beaten by a mob, however remote, should not be underestimated as a force in fashion".
In the end, of course, all is vanity. If the hat might have survived "Hatless Jack" Kennedy, it had to bow before the long-haired fashions of the 1960s. Humphrey Bogart, upon whose narrow skull an old-style 78rpm record seemed to have been tightly moulded, could doff his fedora without loss of face, but when a hirsute hipster of the Age of Aquarius took off his hat - should he have been foolish enough to sport one in the first place - he looked as if he were wearing a brioche on his head. Hat hair causes even more merriment than the hat itself.
Steinberg notes, with slightly shaky grammar, that men invariably took off their hats when they were being photographed.
This reflected a reluctance that goes back to ancient Greece. A hat was an enhancer of masculinity - they made men taller and more glamorous - but, like all enhancers of masculinity, like elevator shoes or toupees, there is something effeminate about being caught wearing one.
A big girl's blouse, it would seem, is no more sissyish than a small man's hat.
John Banville's novel The Sea is shortlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize
Hatless Jack: the President, the Fedora and the Death of the Hat by Neil Steinberg. Granta, 342pp. £12