The Cat in the Hat

On Sunday we saw a friend of ours in his new hat for the first time. It was a brown fedora, a great hat, and it changed how he looked and how we saw him.

This is a friend who likes on occasion to acquire new and good quality things, and the hat was both new and high end. You could tell as soon as you saw him that it was a good hat, and though it was a change in his look, it really suited him.

I held it and admired the weight and feel of it. I looked inside and saw that it was made in Italy by a company called Borsalino, which, it turns out, is one of the world’s finest hat makers. Of course it would be, I realized.

I tried it on, and remarkably it fit my large Anglo-Saxon head exactly. Our friend said that it was a 60, which is the metric equivalent to a seven and a half in our traditional hat size system. It felt good on my head, even though I am not much of a hat person, except for necessities like my tuques in winter and my faded Merganser for summer sun.


Our friend said that wearing the hat made him feel a lot like his father, whom he said he was coming to resemble more and more (this is a feeling I also know!).

I told him that we had noticed a couple of years ago in Paris the number of very distinguished looking gentlemen wearing classy fedoras. Then I noticed it in some high end areas of Istanbul. It was a fedora trend, and our friend was at the cutting edge of fashion.


When I told him this, he insisted the Borsalino fedora was the farthest thing for him from a fashion statement; it was, he said, a movement toward his very unfashionable father, whose fedora was likely made in the USA. And he described a recent moment when he was walking at night, saw the shape of his shadow on the sidewalk, and realized that he had become his father.

I remembered my own father, with his strong nose and chin and a pale grey fedora with a long curved brim. He looked sharp in it, I thought, but it was not a look I ever desired. I still don’t, but I did like the feel of our friend’s fine Italian fedora. I especially liked the trimness of the brim, and our friend said that he did too; in fact, he said that maybe he really wanted to look more like a 50’s jazz musician than like his father, whose fedora would have sported (so to speak) a more conservative and broader brim.

And he did! I told him he was actually a hep cat. He smiled his large and affable smile.

He was, in truth, the cat in the hat.