Dialogue: Today they're all old hat, and thank heavens for that

By JOE BENNETT

All hats are horrible, but back in the days of black-and-white photographs, the Edmonds cook book, cast-iron bicycles and evening newspapers, a man or boy without a hat was naked.

The hats they wore were indistinguishable from each other, which was just as well.

When the All Blacks scored the only try of the series against the Springboks, 50,000 men celebrated by throwing their hats in the air.

Then they put on the one that landed nearest and went to the pub to rock the night away until 6 o'clock.

Meanwhile, nurses with metal combs and starched wimples stalked the nation's schools in search of head lice.

Hats denoted class. The lower classes wore soft hats, the better to accommodate the truncheons of righteousness. They wore cloth caps, so called because they were caps made out of cloth, and pork pie hats, so called because they looked nothing like a pork pie.

Today the pork pie hat is sold only in a few failing boutiques known as gentlemen's outfitters, which cater to men who like to be reminded of boarding school by being intimately measured for a suit.

Each hat is fashioned from a subdued tweed and comes with a car made in Britain in 1951 and a wife in a frock and with a Thermos flask. The car's engine is fitted with a special security device which ensures it must be driven slowly and only on Sundays.

(Though the demise of men's hats is unlamentable, the demise of the universal suit is a loss. Even working men wore suits. It made sense. A man needs to carry stuff - spectacles, money, tobacco, guilt for persecuting women down the ages, betting slips - so he needs pockets. Perhaps that explains why the trousers of today's youth consist principally of zips.)

Hats confer height. Height confers status. Mills and Boon heroes are all six foot tall. So, while the mob wore soft flat hats to gratify the mounted policemen, the men who ruled wore tall and self-important bowler hats and top hats.

To this day bishops wear ludicrous cloven steeples and monarchs wear the hardest hats of all, made of precious metal, jewels and arrogance. A crown booms of authority.

Whereas men's hats have always indicated class, women wear hats to make themselves more beautiful. Few succeed.

In the early days of New Zealand, most women wore the sort of shell-like bonnets that remain popular with producers of films of Jane Austen novels and with dogs which have been to the vet.

Thereafter fashion took women's hats through many execrable designs. There was the turban look, the fez look, the pill-box look and the flying saucer look, all of which have now been consigned to theatrical wardrobes and the heads of women who collect litter and talk to seagulls.

Respectable women now wear hats only at race meetings, weddings and fund-raising functions for the National Party.

Their more extravagant hats need to be fixed with hatpins, devices whose only other purpose is to provide a novel murder weapon for the more traditional breed of thriller writers - the sort who knock up the BBC series set in an entirely imaginary rural England of the 1920s.

In these stories, people of the better classes slaughter each other by implausible methods and for improbable reasons. Such programmes about nice killing are popular with the sort of people who lament our increasingly violent society.

And I am pleased to observe that that violent society is now predominantly bare-headed, although it is a neat irony that young men whose blood is awash with testosterone announce their ferocity with black knitted beanies that look like tea cosies.

These are exactly the sort of hats that their mothers enjoined them to wear to school on cold mornings and at which they scoffed.

But although most adults have grown up and discarded hats, we still inflict them on some children. I had to wear a cap throughout my years at state school, but today that privilege is granted only to boys at expensive preparatory schools.

These caps so intrigue children from less affluent suburbs that the cap-wearers have to be met at the school gate by mothers in all-terrain recreational vehicles whose massive wheels and armour plating repel the taunts of the lower orders.

But children's hats today tell less of class and more of paranoia. We are now so afraid of the sun that we oblige little children to wear extraordinary caps with a handkerchief pinned to the back so they look like a battalion of midget volunteers for the Foreign Legion.

But in time that paranoia will wane, and I have every hope that the next generation will lead us on to the bold and sunlit uplands of a happily hatless society.