Ninetieth anniversary of a philosophical hat

Of this post we have only the title.  It's a typically quixotic and faintly silly title, all that Other Men's Flowers aspired to be, except for typical.  This would have been 49th in Tony's series of hat-related posts, one shudders to think what number 50 would have been like.  As it is, we shall never know which hat was philosophical and ninety years old.  Which is just as it should be, really.

There will be one more post this time next year, just as uninformative as this one.  But Other Men's Flowers has always striven to be complete if nothing else.

Taken for a ride

It has occurred to me that it is a long time since I have added a new titfer to my "Hats" category. This will be OMF's 50th hat and I have chosen it to contrast with all the spectacular, soppy or frightening ones in the series

Actually this one isn't new. I posted this photo of one of my grand-daughters before, as hat number 41, but so what? It's a gentle, pleasing image, and I've nothing else to post today. 

Selah!

 

D'you like my hips...

...to hipsnotise you? Thus the great Carmen Miranda. She is better still in her native Portuguese.

She came into my mind (not that she has ever been much out of it since I first saw That Night in Rio) when Carl de Souza's picture appeared last week, since the lady at Ascot is wearing a more formal version of the sort of thing that Carmen used to wear stapled to her head.

And very nice too, both the lady and the titfer; her name is Anneka Tanaka-Svenska, which comes trippingly off the tongue. She is a well-known vegetarian Natural History presenter and writer who specialises in the Environment, Green Issues and Wolf Conservation, and has been dubbed the Green Guru; well, she would be, wouldn't she? Her website* does not mention her parentage but I suppose Swedish-Japanese would be a fair guess.

Not much doubt about Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha's parentage, though to me she has something reminiscent of a Teutonic Maria: Maria Magdalene Dietrich. Same facial bone structure, same way of narrowing her eyes. But the Brazilian was the better singer and better dancer, especially with the hands and the hips, and equally seductive in a different way: she smiles rather than smoulders. The German may have had better legs but we shall never know: Carmen never showed hers.

Dietrich was born in 1901, so was eight years older than Miranda; sadly, the Brazilian Bombshell died in 1955, while Marlene hung on until 1999.


* ...which states: "Anneka is experienced in studio, live, autocue and corporate". This statement seems to have a word missing to which each of these categories relates: presentations? talks? sex?

The widow's hat

No 27 in an occasional series of extracts from The Postcard Century


October 1909: Is this anything like your hat? I am better again today but rather busy. Yrs .MTF.
Lehar's operetta The Merry Widow swept Europe after the Vienna preview in 1905 and with it the fashions it inspired, notably the headgear described here as Mode 1909, which was more an event than a hat.

Greetings to Auntie

No 25 in an occasional series of extracts from The Postcard Century

August 1908: Albert in Oldham is very free in writing to his aunt in Popeswood. I suppose we shall see you coming back about this size you blooming great squash. This is the girl I was telling you about she is 17st and 19 years of age we went to Blackpool Sat and had a ripping time don't get too saucy when the coom back or else the'll get theyead punching.

Top of the titfers

Only two hat-wearers have been featured more than once in the Oxford Enchiridion of Egregious Headgear. The first is our Queen, who has maintained her quiet simplicity and grace into her eighties while her hats have become ever more manic, and the second is Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi, Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. He has always been a bit of a show-off hatwise, but has recently acquired a sense of style, as demonstrated by this little gold number.

Facially he hasn't changed much, however; he is still a dead ringer for one of Tenniel's creations.

Jollity in São Paulo

Number 143 in the collection Hats That Bring Happiness, here is a picture which captures the exuberance, the joie de vivre, the sheer fun of the Samba Carnival. The hat does, anyway.

Rejoicing in Thimphu

Over the past five years forty-four hats have been featured in Other Men's Flowers. They are variously impressive, frightening, preposterous, awe-inspiring, puzzling, of historical significance or just good for a laugh, and have nothing in common except that at some point in history they have been put on someone's head.

Until now, none of them have been pretty, but this one is. So too is its wearer, who could easily be a new and instantly popular character in any soap. In fact, he is the fifth king of Bhutan and his name is Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck. He was crowned earlier this month by his father, the former king who resigned in 2006.

His crown is unusual as crowns go in that it looks really comfy (and certainly it is much more fetching than the one his fellow Himalayan monarch, King Gyanendra of Nepal, was forced to wear). The thing on top of it I took to be a model of a Buddhist monk, but in fact is a raven's head, and the whole thing is called the Raven Crown, which inexplicably makes its wearer the druk gyalpo, or Dragon King.

Isn't it a nobby one?

Where did you get that hat?
Where did you get that tile?
Isn't it a nobby one
And just the proper style?
I should like to have one
Just the same as that

Wherever I go they'd shout "Hello!

Where did you get that hat?"

Joseph J Sullivan had been a blackface comedian and acrobatic singer (?) who introduced this song at Miners Eighth Avenue Theatre in New York in 1888. It became an immediate hit and the title became a slang catch phrase; the song then crossed the Atlantic to make its mark on the British music hall. The words above are the amended ones written later by James Rolmaz and sung by J G Heffron.

You can get the tune as a ringtone, but never let it ring in Saint Peter's.

Caballerita

This was taken in Andalucia the other day and the one on the horse is my grand-daughter. Although the hat is only a peripheral element here, I could not resist using the picture as the forty-first in the series.

Christians on the catwalk

The struggle for fashion supremacy among top prelates of various persuasions continues unabated, with photos being released to the press almost weekly showing the heights of gorgeousness reached by the latest outfits.

My impression is that Rome is currently winning on points; the snide remarks about the Pontiff's predilection for designer gear (Prada knickers or whatever) have done him no harm and were probably inspired by envy of the stunning all-white get-up he wore to descend the aircraft steps the other day; this was brilliantly set off by his red slippers, allegedly not made by a famous name but by the Vatican's own little cobbler.

The Anglican response to this sort of thing has been rather feeble. The current Primate of All England has always been keen on flashy gold numbers which give him a vaguely showbiz aspect, and of course even the most spectacular mitre loses some of its style when it surmounts a rather sad beard and spectacles (think how soppy the Imperial State Crown looks when the Queen puts on her glasses to read her speech to Parliament).

And now, disappointingly, Michael Nazir-Ali, the 106th Bishop of Rochester and former possible candidate for Cantuar, clearly lacks all sartorial sense, not having realised that if you have your mitre made up from cloth with a chintzy, tea-cosy sort of pattern then you are going to look not so much like a great leader of a great church but merely like a man with a tea-cosy on his head. Lamentable!


[For a note on headgear that is de rigueur for papal obsequies, look HERE.]

De facto President

Former knight Robert Gabriel Mugabe enjoying the Harare sunshine.

Overdue biography

I see that a book about Fazab al-Basry Hashid is being published in the autumn. I was surprised to find that not only is this apparently the first time that anything about him will be published in Europe, but that there does not seem to be a reference to him anywhere on the internet. Many other major Sufi writers and poets, such as Jalalud'din Rumi, Al-Ghazali and Mahmud Shabistari are widely known, but there is nothing to be found about Fazab al-Basry, although in some ways he was one of the most eminent.

I have always admired his writing, though I have only read translated snippets of it in anthologies. He was of course a mystic, though what kind of a mystic he was remains a mystery. However, he may have been one of the most influential men in the Islamic world in the early part of the thirteenth century, and it will be fascinating to learn the story of his life—though in fact very little is known about him—when the biography comes out. I suppose I shall have to buy it, for I doubt if it will be serialised in any of the Sunday papers.

Guarding Old Redsocks

Nowadays his minders are just like those of any other celebrities: highly trained, inconspicuously dressed, watchful eyes in expressionless faces, weapons concealed but ready for instant use. In earlier times they were much prettier although possibly less effective; today the Swiss Guards still exist, but have only a ceremonial function.

The one pictured here looks a bit sulky. This might be because he knows that he will never have a chance to defend the Pope heroically like those being commemorated at this wreath-laying ceremony (they were all slaughtered in May 1527), or merely because he feels a bit of a buffoon standing to attention in a fancy hat and comic pantaloons.

And, the little man in the black suit behind him is undoubtedly up to something.

Danse Macabre

I really cannot say why I find this picture of the Rambert Dance Company hugely funny, but I do, I do. Is it the sheer panache, or is it just the feet?

Formidable millinery

Gwyneth Dunwoody, the longest-serving female member of Parliament, able, fiercely independent-minded and an all-round good egg, died last week. She will be greatly missed, even by those in the Labour party whom she had sometimes shamed or embarrassed by being persistent and outspoken in pursuit of the truth.

It was well-known that she did not much mind being described as a battleaxe and was indifferent to her personal appearance, but this photograph taken early in her career suggest that she was well aware of the role a significant hat can play in politics, and I am including it in my gallery of Hats That Changed the World.

A hat for a Head of State?

This man, Ma Ying-jeou, a candidate for the presidency of Taiwan, is wearing a traditional aboriginal headress which he clearly believes may improve his chances. He may well be mistaken in this, but the Reuters photo appeared in at least one European national daily so he is certainly ahead of all his rivals in terms of world-wide publicity.

He looks a jolly fellow; let us all wish him the best of luck.

P.S. Since I wrote this last week, it has been announced that he did win the election.

The Pharaoh speaks

A rather feeble joke from Private Eye,

but it's a gorgeous picture, isn't it?

The Isambard Look

Time, I think, for another Sensational Hats post. Most of the headgear featured in this popular series is in one way or another extraordinary, but this is an exception: for men of substance in Victorian times, hats like the one illustrated here were thought to be absolutely ordinary, in fact de rigueur, and you would be considered eccentric or possibly even subversive if you were seen in public without something of this kind on your head.

I have taken a holistic approach here and shown the hat not in isolation but as part of an ensemble which is very much of its time, with regard not only to the crumpled trousers but also to the massive chains forming the background; this was the age of real heavyweight engineering, when mighty machines were clanking and steaming rather than buzzing and flickering like the piddling toys of our effete age.

If ever a man had an excuse for displaying crumpled trousers and a waistcoat in disarray, it was the great Brunel in this picture, though his demeanour, coolly smoking one of his 40-a-day cigars, belies the stress of the occasion, the difficult sideways launching of the SS Great Eastern (two people were killed). This was an iron sailing steam ship he had designed, the largest ship ever built at the time, with the capacity to carry 4,000 passengers around the world without refueling.

Sadly, Brunel suffered a stroke and died in 1859, just before the Great Eastern made her first voyage to New York.

One more royal titfer

I am not obsessed with Her Majesty the Queen, nor do I have a hat fixation. I am posting yet one more picture of a spectacular hat (also worn in Kampala) because this one confirms that I was absolutely right when I suggested in a post a couple of weeks ago that many of the Queen’s hats are inspired by the esculent architectural fantasies created by a great chef at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It looks so much more like a patissier’s creation than a milliner’s that perhaps it really is made of spun sugar, though it is unlikely that jesters at the Court of St James (Gyles Brandreth, say) would be allowed to dance on it in the way that was permitted, so we are told, to those entertaining the royalty of Carême’s day.