London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
Pretty classy, this daily London fix. Hats off to it.
Cute way of saying today we’re going to begin with two hats.
Not actual hats.
Hat words.
Fedora.
Trilby.
Two words that arrive wearing good tailoring. Words with a faint aroma of cigar smoke and rainy pavements. Words that sound as if they know things about racehorses and Balkan politics.
Fedora.
Trilby.
You hear them and somewhere in the back of your mind a black-and-white film flickers into life. Humphrey Bogart. Graham Greene. A private detective in a down-at-heel bar. Or perhaps a louche literary type in Soho circa 1958 ordering another bottle and really, really not needing another bottle.
But here’s the thing.
Neither word started life as a hat.
They began life as fiction.
Which is gloriously London somehow.
Let’s start with trilby.
The word comes from Trilby by George du Maurier.
And when I say the book was successful, I mean Victorian Britain briefly lost its collective mind over it.
This was full-blown cultural mania.
There were Trilby songs. Trilby dances. Trilby shoes. Trilby this, Trilby that. The Victorians could merchandise with the best of them.
Now in the stage adaptation one of the characters wore a soft felt hat with a narrow brim.
And London looked at this hat and said, “Right then. That’s a trilby.”
Which it has been ever since.
Though today most people call trilbies fedoras and fedoras trilbies and somewhere in the afterlife an extremely agitated hatter is still trying to sort everybody out.
Technically, a trilby has a narrower brim.
A fedora has a wider brim.
But honestly, good luck policing that distinction in the wild.
Now fedora.
That’s even better.
Fedora comes from an 1882 French play called Fédora by Victorien Sardou.
And the heroine, Princess Fédora Romanoff, was played by the great actress Sarah Bernhardt.
Sarah Bernhardt was one of those people who didn’t enter rooms so much as happen to them.
Immense stage presence. The most famous actress in the world.
And in the play she wore a soft felt hat.
Women began copying it.
Which means, rather wonderfully, the fedora started life as a woman’s hat.
Only later did men nick it.
And speaking of nicking things…
English has spent centuries looting words from other languages.
Touched on this yesterday.
Loot itself, for example. Hindi originally.
Same with thug.
And doolally.
The British Empire didn’t just travel. It hoovered up vocabulary as it went along.
Which brings us to St James’s Street.
One of the grandest streets in London.
Clubland.
Old money.
Tailcoats.
Discreet brass plaques.
The faint lingering aroma of cigar smoke and inherited confidence.
And almost all the way down St James’s Street, practically in the shadow of St James’s Palace itself, sits Lock & Co. Hatters.
This year they celebrate their 350th anniversary.
Three hundred and fifty years.
When they opened for business in 1676 Sir Christopher Wren was still rebuilding London after the Great Fire. The United States didn’t exist. Neither did the United Kingdom.
And Lock & Co. was already putting hats on heads.
They are generally reckoned to be the oldest hat shop in the world.
And almost certainly the classiest.
Possibly also the most expensive, though let us pass lightly over that painful detail.
We stop outside Lock’s on our Old Palace Quarter walk every Friday afternoon and it’s always one of those moments.
People slow down.
They stare in the windows.
And even if they’ve never worn a hat in their life, something stirs.
Because the hats in those windows aren’t just hats.
They’re aspiration.
Romance.
Character.
You look at them and think, “Perhaps I could become the sort of person who wears a hat.”
That’s powerful magic.
Lock’s has supplied hats to admirals, actors, aristocrats, Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin and probably several discreetly nervous foreign princes.
Oscar Wilde wore Lock hats.
Lord Nelson wore Lock hats.
And if you’ve ever seen a bowler hat, you can thank Lock’s for that as well.
The bowler was created in London in 1849 by the Lock hatters for a client who wanted a hard-wearing hat gamekeepers could wear
while riding
without low branches knocking the thing off.
And there you have London again.
The city where a practical piece of riding kit somehow becomes the international visual shorthand for Britishness.
Extraordinary.
Lock & Co., incidentally, also supplies headgear to moi, David, the London Walks capo.
On my walks I’m often topped to the north with a Lock & Co. fedora.
And there is, I have to say, something rather splendid about wearing a proper hat in London.
Especially on a winter afternoon.
You pull the brim down slightly and suddenly the city changes around you.
The shopfronts seem older.
The pavements shinier.
The taxi cabs more cinematic.
You feel faintly Graham Greene-ish.
As though you ought to know something about spies.
Or racehorses.
Or Balkan politics.
That’s the thing about London.
This city understands costume.
Always has.
London is theatre.
Display.
Role-play.
Reinvention.
Which is why it somehow feels perfectly fitting that two of the world’s most famous hat names began not in factories or fashion houses but in stories.
In fiction.
In imagination.
Fedora.
Trilby.
Words that became hats.
And hats that became characters.
Yes, London calling. This is London. For sure.
See you tomorrow.