9 Iconic Hat Styles Explained: Top Hat, Bowler, Homburg, Fedora, Trilby, Panama, Flat Cap, Eight-Piece and Baseball Cap
Nine hat styles carry most of British dress history between them, and almost all of them were shaped, named or sold on one short stretch of St James's Street. Chris Modoo went to Lock & Co Hatters to talk to Maxwell Newman about what each style is, where it came from and how you would wear it now.
Enter our prize draw to win a £500 gift voucher
For more styling tutorials subscribe to our channel
Subscribe to Our ChannelA short walk in St James's
Why So Many British Hat Styles Began on St James's Street
Lock & Co has been trading from the bottom of St James's Street since 1765, which makes it the oldest hat shop in the world and, by most reckonings, the oldest family business still running anywhere. That longevity matters for a practical reason rather than a romantic one. When a hat style was invented in Britain, there is a decent chance it was ordered over that counter, written into a ledger and named after the customer who asked for it. The shop is an archive with a shopfront.
What follows is far from exhaustive. There are a great many more styles than the nine here, and Maxwell Newman could have talked about most of them. We narrowed it down to the hats that people have heard of, argue about, or wear badly, which turns out to be much the same list.
The most formal hat there is
What a Silk Plush Top Hat Is and Why They Are No Longer Made
The top hat is an English invention, and everyone has met one, usually as a Monopoly piece rather than as an object on a head. The version worth understanding is the silk plush topper. Hatter's plush is a sparse, long-pile silk velvet, woven so that the pile lies completely flat on itself. That is what produces the lustre. Run a finger up the nap and the shine disappears in a line, which is why the pile is dressed anti-clockwise and uniform, using velvet and a fine spray of water. The finish behaves rather like a well-polished shoe, and it needs the same regular attention before a big day.
The material was invented in Britain, on the Strand, and then perfected and produced in France on specialist looms. General production of hatter's plush stopped in the late 1950s as demand fell away, and the looms that could weave it no longer exist. Hats continued to be built from dwindling stock into the 1970s, which is why late examples often carry grosgrain on the brim and even across the crown. There were cases where the silk ran out under the ribbon itself. The remnants were being squeezed for everything they had.
A silk plush top hat cannot be made today. It can only be found, restored and looked after.
Two consequences follow. The first is price, which tends to be politely listed as being on application, and which depends less on the hat than on your head. Vintage hats were built for smaller heads than we now have, so the larger your size the scarcer and dearer the hat becomes. Maxwell's advice on asking the price is to be sitting down, ideally after a good lunch. The second consequence is custody. If a silk topper comes down to you through the family, take it out of the dressing-up box and bring it in for a spruce up. A good hatter will work on any silk topper, whoever made it, even if it only wants a polish.
Silk plush top hat, @therollinson | Silk top hat worn with morning dress, Lock & Co Hatters
Modern top hats are made in melusine, a fur felt finished directionally so that it catches the light. It is a handsome material and a practical answer to a vanished one, though it will never be quite as light or as reflective as plush. Weight is the detail that surprises people who handle a silk topper for the first time. In the middle of June at Ascot, that lightness stops being a curiosity and starts being the point.
A question of enclosures
Is a Grey Top Hat Less Formal Than a Black One?
Most people assume grey is the softer option. The opposite is closer to the truth. As Lock & Co tell it, the grey topper was created within the house specifically for the royal enclosure at Ascot, which makes it the more exclusive hat of the two rather than the relaxed alternative. Photographs of Royal Ascot in the 1950s and 1960s show a sea of grey, helped along by the fact that silk plush had by then become hard to obtain and the grey hat was favoured by the royal party.
Silk has since come back into favour with buyers, though grey looks likely to return. More clients are dressing properly for two or three days of racing, which means a second morning coat and a second hat. A black topper and a grey one cover the whole week between them. Vintage grey hats do exist and can be restored, though there is a thinner resale market for them, so they tend to come in for repair rather than for sale.
Grey top hat, Lock & Co Hatters | Morning dress, Lock & Co Hatters, @gregjwchalmers
The other question that comes up constantly is whether the top hat worn with morning dress is the same hat worn with white tie. It is. There is no separate evening topper waiting to be bought, which is welcome news given what the hats cost.
Say it like the shop does
Why the Bowler Hat Is Really Called a Coke Hat
Inside Lock & Co the bowler is a Coke, spelled C O K E and pronounced cook. The name follows house practice: the hat is named after the customer who commissioned it. In 1849 Edward Coke, younger brother of the second Earl of Leicester, wanted headgear that would protect the gamekeepers on the family estate, whose top hats were forever being knocked off by low branches. Lock & Co took the problem to the London hatmakers Thomas and William Bowler, and the result was a low, hard, domed crown that sat close to the head. Coke is said to have tested it by putting it on the floor and stamping on it twice before handing over twelve shillings. It is, in effect, a prototype crash helmet.
The Bowler brothers made it, the Coke family inspired it, and the public settled on the makers' name. In America it became the derby. Ask for a Coke, a bowler or a derby and you will be handed the same hat, though asking for a Coke in St James's will mark you out as someone who has read up.
The pop culture is unusually rich for a piece of gamekeeping equipment. Patrick Macnee wore one as John Steed in the 1960s television Avengers, which remains the definitive outing for the style. Charlie Chaplin wore one, Laurel and Hardy wore two, and Malcolm McDowell wore one as Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange, which took the hat somewhere considerably darker. In London it was standard issue for the city man, worn with a three-piece chalkstripe and a tightly furled umbrella, and it still appears on Remembrance Sunday among the guards officers at the Cenotaph. The Oxford University proctors' constables, known as bulldogs, are famously supposed to wear them to this day.
The Wild Bunch, Fort Worth, 1900 | City bankers, Henry Grant Collection, London Museum
A Bond correction while we are here. Oddjob's hat in Goldfinger is not the standard Coke. It is a Cambridge, a flat-top bowler, which is a separate model and a useful piece of information to have at hand next time the subject arises over dinner.
Bowlers are still worn, though most of the shop's output now goes to America, so you see fewer on British streets than the hat's reputation would suggest. Where they do appear, they are usually dressed down. Worn with jeans and a good coat, the bowler reads as deliberate rather than nostalgic.
The statesman's felt
The Homburg: A City Hat With More Swagger Than a Bowler
The homburg takes its name from Bad Homburg, the German spa town where Edward VII encountered the style in the 1880s and brought it back into British circulation. Its great British champion was Anthony Eden, who wore it so consistently that the trade began calling the model the Eden. Churchill wore one too. Eden gets less credit at home than he does in France and North America, where he is still treated as a figure of real elegance.
Winston Churchill, Imperial War Museum (HU 55521) | Anthony Eden at Potsdam, 1945, US National Archives
It became widely popular in the 1920s and it is very much a city hat: formal occasions, funerals, the sort of day that calls for a long overcoat. In degrees of formality it sits close to the bowler, though it carries itself differently. The bowler is a steeple and looks marvellous, and it is also a demanding thing to wear. The homburg is easier. It goes with a three-piece suit, it goes with a full-length overcoat, and plenty of people now wear it with jeans.
Structurally it bridges the hard hats and the soft ones. The bowler takes its cue from it going one way, the fedora takes its cue going the other, and the homburg sits between them. Black with a black band is the formal setting. The interesting versions are brown or navy, or a buff dove grey with black binding, which is a very smart look indeed. The binding does not have to match the band either. Older homburgs frequently pair a grey binding with a black band, exactly the same tonal trick the grey topper plays at Ascot.
Softer ground
What Makes a Fedora a Fedora
Once you move into soft hats the vocabulary gets slippery, and the fedora suffers most from it. The word is used loosely for anything with a brim and a creased crown, which covers a great deal of ground and explains a great deal of confusion. In practice a fedora means a fuller brim and a crown that has been creased along its length with a pinch at the front, soft enough to be reshaped by hand and formal enough to wear with a good overcoat.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1909
The hat Maxwell picked out for the video is made in an extra fine pounced felt, which gives a very flat surface that reads as a different colour depending on where the light lands. Ambiguous colours of that sort are quietly useful. A mole brown with warm undertones will sit happily with browns, and it works equally well against navy or charcoal. Smart enough for town, relaxed enough for tweed, and perfectly good with jeans and the brim popped up.
Ask for a brown felt
The Trilby and the Racing Felt: The Short-Brimmed Alternative
The trilby is the fedora's shorter-brimmed relation, with a snappier attitude and a crown that sits closer to the head. The racing felt belongs to the same family: a short brim, built for a full day outdoors and generally unlined so that it breathes. If you have ever seen a paddock at a country meeting, you have seen a great many of them.
Longer-standing customers ignore the terminology altogether. They ask for a felt, in a colour, and leave it there. A brown felt, please, with no further specification. It sounds impossibly vague and it is in fact a fairly precise order, because you can safely bet on a short-brimmed racing felt turning up in response.
Wood, steam and shellac
What Blocking and Shellac Actually Do to a Felt Hat
A racing felt arrives from the workroom with what the trade calls an open crown, which is to say no shape at all. It looks faintly like a bucket. Blocking is the process of putting the shape in, and it happens over a wooden block in much the same way a shoemaker works over a last. The crease, sometimes called the bash, is then set to the customer's specification while they wait. There is no end to the possible crown shapes, which is the part of the shop that regular customers enjoy most.
Steam alone will do the job for most shapes. Anything more ambitious is reinforced with shellac, a resin that used to turn up everywhere: in leather finishing, in early records, even in hairspray. American hats are typically stiffer than their British equivalents, and that stiffness is shellac doing its work. It also means a hat you have worn in and now love can be locked in place, more or less permanently, rather than left to drift.
Soft hats are the reason no two hats in a room look alike. Everyone handles them differently and everyone wears them at a slightly different angle. Purists insist on lifting a hat by the brim, since repeated pinching of the crown eventually produces a small hole at the top, known in the trade as a shooting accident. It can be stiffened and backed from behind, though it never looks quite the same again. Maxwell is relaxed about it and prefers a hat with some wear in it, which seems to us the right position.
The practical argument
Why a Felt Hat Beats an Umbrella in a Light Shower
Every hat in the shop, with a handful of exceptions, is meant to be worn in the rain. Racing felts in particular come unlined so that they breathe, because you will have the thing on your head all day. City hats are lined, on the reasoning that they are worn for a couple of hours between a car and a building.
In a light shower a felt hat and a decent coat will do more for you than an umbrella, and they leave both hands free. Even a silk topper will survive a downpour. It is an English invention, after all, and the polishing is done with water in the first place. These are beautiful objects that were designed to do a job, and the job has not changed.
Ecuador, not Panama
Panama Hats: Handwoven in Ecuador and Named After a Canal
The Panama is the summer hat of the English imagination, and its name is a geographical accident. The hats come from Ecuador, where they are woven entirely by hand from toquilla palm. They were shipped to the workers digging the Panama Canal, Theodore Roosevelt was photographed wearing one during a visit, and the name stuck to the wrong country for good.
No machinery is involved in making a proper Panama, and quality varies enormously with the fineness of the weave. The better shops carry several grades. They are delicate things and want a regular steam, and a tired one can be sent back for reconditioning. Unlike a felt, a Panama is blocked on an aluminium block, which lets it take its shape immediately. Wood will do it, but slowly.
The colour spread is wider than the beige of popular memory, running from off-white through to darker tones that soften the formality of the shape. New straws come through regularly too, including Baku, which is lighter in both colour and weight. Bands are where the fun is. Club bands, military bands or a simple change of colour can be fitted, and it is not a one-time decision. Bring the hat back in and have the band changed whenever the mood takes you.
Theodore Roosevelt at the Panama Canal, 1906
Formality is entirely up to you. A Panama will carry a three-piece linen suit at Henley or a day at the cricket, and it will sit on your head by the pool with swimming trunks and a T-shirt. It also does the oldest job in hats, which is keeping the sun off. No UPF rating, no marketing claims, just several centuries of evidence.
The cap you can fold
The Flat Cap: How to Choose the Cloth and Wear It
The flat cap goes by cheese cutter, driving cap and several other names depending on where you grew up. They can be made up in any tweed you care to supply, which is how estate tweeds end up on the heads of both the owner and the staff. Summer weights are made too. Linen is lovely if the classic Panama feels like too much hat, and worsteds and flannels work for anyone who runs warm. It is a cloth cap at the end of the day, so almost anything on a tailor's shelf can become one.
Tweed and linen flat caps, Lock & Co Hatters
On styling, the shop's position and ours agree. A shooting suit with a matching cap is a great deal of the same cloth in one outfit. Tonal and complementary is the more interesting route. The practical advantage over every other hat here is that a flat cap folds into a coat pocket, which means it does not get left in a pub or found by the dog. It works at the races, on a shoot, at the football and on the walk to the pub afterwards, which is a wider brief than any other hat in this list.
A cap with a television problem
The Eight-Piece Cap and What Peaky Blinders Got Wrong
The eight-piece cap, the baker boy or newsboy, is a variation on the flat cap and an American one. It was worn by factory workers and was originally made from remnants, so the panels were often mismatched. Cap makers bought ends of cloth from tailors and turned them into hats, which is about as humble a beginning as a garment can have. Modern versions are made in a single cloth, which loses the patchwork and keeps the fuller, rounder shape.
Which brings us to Birmingham in the 1920s. A recent television series has sold the eight-piece cap as authentic period dress for the era, and it is not. What those men wore was a flat cap, cut a good deal fuller in the crown than the modern version, which in a grainy photograph can pass for a baker boy if you are not looking closely. Peaky Blinders is playing fast and loose with style as well as with history. The fuller crown remains popular with people serious about country dress, so the correct version is still available to anyone who wants it.
The modern question
Should You Wear a Baseball Cap With Tailoring?
People are often surprised to find baseball caps in a traditional hatter's. Maxwell is unbothered by the objection, and points out that the shop was not making flat caps in Nelson's day either. A hatter that stops moving stops being a hatter.
There is also a decent case for the cap's lineage. The eight-piece construction and the addition of a longer peak gets you most of the way to a baseball cap, and the sporting version followed the same practical logic that produced every other hat here. Not all of them are equal. A cashmere cap made in St James's is a different proposition to the branded article, and it will sit far more comfortably alongside a jacket.
Baseball caps, Lock & Co Hatters
The wider point is that hats need entry points. Plenty of people who would not put a homburg on their head will happily wear a good cap, and a good cap is how a lot of them find their way to the rest. Customers travel from the other side of the world to buy a hat in that shop. If some of them leave in a baseball cap, at least it is a very good one.
Bringing it together
How to Wear a Hat With a Pocket Square and a Tie
A hat changes the balance of an outfit, because it puts a strong shape and a block of colour at the top of the frame. The usual mistake is to match everything. A brown felt, a brown tie and a brown square is a lot of certainty in one outfit. Pick up a tone from the hat somewhere lower down instead. A mole grey felt with warm undertones asks for a square with a brown or ochre thread running through it rather than a flat brown to match.
Formality should agree from top to bottom. A homburg with a three-piece suit wants a silk tie and a restrained square. A Panama with linen can take something considerably livelier, since the whole outfit is already relaxed. And if you are still working out which hat suits which occasion, our guide to hat etiquette covers when to remove it, how to hold it and where not to put it down.
Frequently Asked Questions
Your Questions Answered
Why is a bowler hat called a Coke hat?
The St James's hatters have long named hats after the customers who commissioned them. The hat was ordered in 1849 by Edward Coke, younger brother of the second Earl of Leicester, to protect his gamekeepers from low branches, so the shop calls it a Coke, pronounced cook. It was made by the London hatmakers Thomas and William Bowler, and the public adopted the makers' name instead. In America the same hat is called a derby.
Are silk top hats still made?
No. Silk plush was woven on specialist looms in France, general production stopped in the late 1950s and the looms no longer exist. Hats were built from remaining stock into the 1970s, often with grosgrain on the brim and crown where the silk had run short. Every silk topper in circulation today is vintage, which is why they hold their value and why restoration and polishing matter. Modern top hats are made in melusine, a fur felt finished to catch the light.
Is a grey top hat less formal than a black one?
It is the more formal of the two by origin. The grey topper was created for the royal enclosure at Ascot, which makes it the more exclusive hat rather than the relaxed alternative. Photographs of Royal Ascot in the 1950s and 1960s are dominated by grey, partly because silk plush had become scarce and partly because the grey hat was favoured by the royal party. A black hat and a grey hat between them cover a full week of racing.
Can you wear a felt hat in the rain?
Yes. Almost every hat in a British hatter's shop is meant to be worn in the rain, and a felt hat with a good coat handles a light shower better than an umbrella while leaving your hands free. Racing felts come unlined so that they breathe over a long day outdoors, while city hats are lined because they are worn for shorter stretches. Even a silk top hat will survive a shower, since the polishing is done with water.
What is the difference between a fedora, a trilby and a racing felt?
The terms overlap. Fedora is used broadly for a soft brimmed hat with a creased crown, trilby usually describes a shorter brim with a sharper attitude, and racing felt refers to a short-brimmed hat built for a day outdoors, generally unlined. Long-standing customers often ignore the distinctions entirely and simply ask for a felt in a colour, which in practice usually means a short-brimmed racing felt.
Are Panama hats made in Panama?
They are made in Ecuador, woven entirely by hand from toquilla palm. The name comes from their use by workers on the Panama Canal and from Theodore Roosevelt being photographed in one there. Quality depends on the fineness of the weave, the hats are blocked on aluminium so they take their shape immediately, and they respond well to a regular steam. Bands can be changed as often as you like.
Did people in 1920s Birmingham really wear eight-piece caps?
No. The eight-piece baker boy or newsboy cap is an American style, worn by factory workers and originally made from tailors' remnants, which is why the panels were often mismatched. In 1920s Birmingham the correct hat is a flat cap cut with a much fuller crown than the modern version. In old photographs the fuller shape can pass for a baker boy, which is probably how the confusion started.
To view the full collection click on the button below.