At 62, I had been saying hats do not suit me for forty years
At 62, I had been saying hats do not suit me for forty years
Six things the Josephine hat gets right, from a woman who was wrong about this for most of her adult life.
Caroline Richards · Customer · Nottinghamshire · 5 min read
Hats do not suit me. I have said that sentence so many times that I stopped hearing it. In shops, at other people's weddings, at the school gates thirty years ago, on a freezing platform at Nottingham station last January with my ears going purple. Somebody would say you want a hat in this, and I would say, oh, hats do not suit me, and we would both nod as though a fact had been established.
It was not a fact. It was a review of one hat, written in about 1985, that I had been reissuing ever since.
And I had been cold for forty winters on the strength of it.
How it happens
You try a hat on in a shop when you are young. It is almost certainly a plain woolly one, because that is what there is, and a plain woolly one does exactly one thing to a face. It pulls the whole outline in tight and flat, takes away your hair, and leaves you looking like a thumb. You look in the mirror under a strip light, you think oh dear, and you put it back.
Then you never test it again. Not once in four decades. You carry the verdict around instead, and it hardens, and after a while it stops being a thing you noticed in a mirror and becomes a thing about you. Hats do not suit me. Like a blood group.
My sister bought me a woolly hat two Christmases ago. It is still in the drawer with the label on. I am not proud of that, but I think a lot of you have that drawer.
What I had wrong
I was not wrong that the hat looked bad. I was wrong about why.
It was never that hats did not suit me. It was that a flat hat has no shape to give you, so it can only take yours away.
A plain beanie sits on your head like a sock. There is nothing to it. Everything it does to your face, it does by subtraction. Whereas a hat with a deep turned-up brim brings its own shape with it, and the shape sits out away from your head rather than clamped onto it, and suddenly there is something around your face instead of something pressing on it. Same head. Entirely different outcome.
Nobody ever explained that to me and I am slightly annoyed, because the whole of my forties could have been warmer.
The Josephine came from Nottingham Boutique, a little shop that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now. It is a plush faux fur hat with a rounded crown and a deep rolled brim, and it was nineteen pounds ninety five, which I will come back to because that is the other thing I got wrong.
The day it came. I had it on in front of the hall mirror before I had taken my coat off.
IT IS THE BRIM THAT DOES THE WORK
The brim is turned up all the way round and it is deep, and the fur on it is longer and looser than the fur on the crown, so it flares out and the hat is widest at the bottom. That is the entire difference between this and every hat I have ever rejected. The brim holds a shape on its own. It is not relying on your head to give it one, which means it is not squashing your head to get it.
Where the brim meets the crown. You can see how much longer the fur is on the brim.
I have a small face and everything swamps me. The brim stands away rather than sitting on me. First hat I have kept.
Margaret H., RavensheadIT FRAMES MY FACE INSTEAD OF SWALLOWING IT
Because the brim sits out and the crown is a soft round dome rather than a tight cap, what you get in the mirror is an outline around your face rather than a lid on top of it. My hair comes out underneath at the back and the sides, which also helps, because half of what a woolly hat takes away is your hair. I will not pretend it is doing anything clever. It is just the right shape, which after forty years of the wrong shape feels like quite a lot.
From the side, so you can see how far the brim comes out.
My daughter took a photograph of me in it without telling me and it is the first picture of myself in winter I have actually liked.
Eileen P., StrelleyIT MAKES A PLAIN COAT LOOK LIKE A DECISION
From now until about March every single person you pass is in a dark coat, and so are you, and the whole business of looking like you have made an effort quietly gets suspended for six months. One pale faux fur hat over a navy coat undoes that on its own. I have not bought a new coat. I have not done anything at all except put this on top of the coat I already had, and it reads completely differently.
Walking back through the park. That pale shape against a dark coat is the whole point.
Wore it over the same old black coat I have had for years and two people asked if the coat was new. It was not.
Christine W., CostockIT IS WARM EXACTLY WHERE I AM COLD
The turned-up brim is doubled fur and it sits right down over the ears and across the forehead, which is precisely where the cold gets in and precisely where a hat usually stops. I have spent years with a scarf hauled up over my ears, looking like a woman with toothache, because the hat I was not wearing would have done the job properly. This one does. Ears, forehead, done.
I get earache in the wind and it has genuinely stopped. The brim comes right down over them.
Dorothy S., WysallIT WEIGHS NOTHING, SO IT LIVES IN MY BAG
This matters more than it sounds. The reason people own hats and do not wear them is that you have to decide, at the door, whether you are going to need it, and you are always wrong. This one weighs almost nothing, so it goes in the bag and the decision never has to be made. It shakes back into shape afterwards. Mine has been in and out of a handbag since it arrived and it still looks like itself.
On the hall table with the scarf and gloves, where I can pick it up on the way past.
Squashes into a bag and comes out fine. I take it everywhere now rather than guessing in the morning.
Joan R., PlumtreeIT IS FAUX, AND I WOULD NOT HAVE WORN IT OTHERWISE
I want to say this plainly because I suspect it is the quiet reason a lot of women our age never bought a hat like this. I would not have worn real fur. My mother had a fur collar in the 1960s and I remember thinking even as a child that I did not want one. This is faux and it is animal-free, and once you know that you can simply enjoy how soft it is without the small uncomfortable thought going on underneath.
Would never have bought the real thing. Lovely to be able to have the look without it.
Sylvia B., NormantonThe Josephine, against the woolly hat in my sister's Christmas bag
The woolly hat is still in the drawer with its label on, so this is a fair fight and I am not stacking it.
Flat, with no shape of its own to give you
Sits down tight and takes your hair with it
Stops above the ears, which is where the cold is
Two Christmases in a drawer, label still on
Confirmed, every time, that hats do not suit me
A deep turned-up brim that holds its own shape
Sits out around the face, hair still showing
Doubled fur right down over the ears and forehead
On the hall table, out most days since it came
Settled a forty year argument in about ten seconds
About the price
It is £19.95. It was £40.00.
Here is my honest reaction, which was not a flattering one. I saw twenty pounds and assumed thin. I pictured the sort of fur that is sparse enough to see the backing through, that goes matted and sad after a fortnight and ends up looking like something off a seaside stall.
It is not thin. The pile on the brim is long and dense and it springs back when you push your hand into it, and the crown is a shorter, tighter pile so the two parts of the hat actually look different from one another, which is the sort of thing nobody bothers with at this money. It is hand wash in cold water, which I would say is the one thing to know before you order.
I went and read the reviews afterwards, which is the wrong order, I know. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some sites, which if I am honest made me trust it rather more. One woman had written, "I am sixty eight and I have never once suited a hat and I have now bought this in two colours." That would have decided it for me, had I read it first.
Put out with the coat the night before, which I have not done since I was working.
What I would tell you if we were friends
If you were sat here with a cup of tea I would not try to talk you into a hat. I would ask you when you decided that hats do not suit you, and I would watch you try to remember, and I do not think you would be able to.
That is the bit worth sitting with. Most of the things we are certain we cannot wear were decided once, quickly, a very long time ago, in bad lighting, about one particular garment, and then never looked at again. They are not facts about us. They are old reviews we have not updated.
I was not a woman who did not suit hats. I was a woman who had tried one hat, in 1985, and never checked again.
You do not have to agree with me. Twenty pounds and thirty days is a cheap way to find out which of us is right.
Caroline
JOSEPHINE | Luxury Vegan Fur Hat
- Plush faux fur, thick and soft, and completely animal-free
- Deep turned-up brim for extra warmth around the ears and forehead
- Rounded crown in a classic winter shape that frames the face
- Light enough to pop in your bag for when the weather turns
- One size fits most
- Five colours: cream, white, brown, black and soft pink
- Hand wash cold · free UK delivery and 30 day returns
The autumn sale is on now, half price.