Why the bowler hat is back in fashion

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10 April 2012

The King's Speech has already made royalty and a stuttering Colin Firth fashionable. Now the low-budget British hit has revived the fortunes of that least likely of style accessories, the bowler hat.

The round-crowned titfer sported by Firth's George VI in the film has this week taken the high street, the catwalk and the internet by storm. If costume designer Jenny Beavan doesn't win the Oscar on Sunday - one of 12 for which The King's Speech is nominated - she can console herself that audiences have taken the film to their heads, as well as their hearts.

In her London Fashion Week show, Princess Diana's favoured designer Caroline Charles sent her models sauntering down the runway in bowlers and trilbies. At the Vivienne Westwood Red Label show, half the eyes were on the luscious curves of Daisy Lowe: the other half were on her beloved, Matt Smith, in the front row, gazing at her from under the brim of a natty bowler.

The video for Radiohead's new single, Lotus Flower, has meantime become a hit internet meme, viewed more than four million times and inspiring a number of artful mashups. This is partly thanks to the herky-jerky dance devised by leading choreographer Wayne McGregor for singer Thom Yorke. But largely because Yorke is rocking a bowler in the clip.

More important than its adoption by designers and the celebritocracy, though, is that the bowler hat has been endorsed by the ultimate style arbiter, the great British public. This week saw cool girls with bowlers jammed down over long tresses outside Fashion Week venues. They wear their headgear with fitted jackets or long sloppy jumpers. On the streets, I've seen bowlers worn "ironically" by posey Shoreditch hipsters but also smartly by well-dressed dudes. Just the other day in Kensington I passed a dapper young black man attired in bowler, silk scarf and a camel Crombie coat like Firth's.

This return to the high street brings the bowler back to its roots. Designed in 1849 as robust, undentable headgear for gamekeepers, this was the hat of the working class or the dispossessed: navvies, Wild West pioneers, Chaplin's tramp. Only in the mid-20th century did it morph into the badge of the Establishment - the solicitor, off-duty soldier or bank manager - and then into a symbol of dull conformity in the face of increasingly bare-headed post-war fashion trends.

The paintings of René Magritte, Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange, and Arthur Lowe in television's Dad's Army all did their bit to kill it off.

But in fashion, items of clothing never really die, they just await reinvention. Amid a welcome resurgence in the wearing of hats among both men and women, the bowler is defiantly back on top. It has a clean outline, a pleasingly bosomy shape, can be dressed up or down and keeps the rain off your face. I tip my hat to it.

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