By following the fortunes of a single item of fashion--the bowler or derby hat--Robinson unfolds a cultural history of modernism and modern life. In this innovative book, Robinson pursues the bowler's intriguing history through an illustrated tour of art, literature, fashion, politics, and film up to the present day. 52 illustrations.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Kirkus Reviews
Robinson (English/University of San Diego; Comic Moments, 1992, etc.--not reviewed) traces the cultural significance of the bowler hat from 1850 to the present--in a study as lighthearted and charming as its subject. Having asked, ``Why did Samuel Beckett specify that the four major characters of Waiting for Godot wear bowler hats?,'' in a 1986 TriQuarterly article, Robinson was moved to expand his inquiry to book length, studying modern life through the evolving meanings of this item of fashion that combines--symbolically and literally- -both lightness and weight. Following the history of the bowler ``as though a wind were blowing it just beyond [my] reach,'' Robinson tells of the hat's debut, in 1850 London, where its combination of style and function satisfied Victorian England's obsession with the practical and the correct. The bowler soon passed from informal use among the aristocracy into a badge of respectability by the upwardly mobile middle class, eventually inspiring Chaplin to use it in his parody of the earnest ``little man.'' As 20th-century life brought new strains of malaise, the bowler became a symbol of mass-produced anonymity in Magritte's paintings; of grim soullessness in the works of Anton Raderscheidt and Georg Grosz; and, finally, in Germany, of Jewish greed and evil. By 1948, when Beckett began writing Godot, the bowler had come to stand for an immutable social identity. It has since settled into the relative obscurity of costume wear, resurfacing only occasionally--e.g., as Oddjob's weapon in Goldfinger and an erotic toy in Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Yet the bowler continues to ``[express] its history precisely as it floats past it,'' Robinson concludes, until it becomes a pure design object that can adapt to anything--and ``the dream of the modern will be realized, in at least one small object, at the end of the modern age.'' A tip of the hat to this playful yet thought-provoking work. (Fifty-two illustrations) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"Hats off to Mr. Robinson."--New York Times Book Review
"A study as lighthearted and charming as its subject. . . . A tip of the hat to this playful yet thought-provoking work."--Kirkus Reviews
"When Fred Miller Robinson tugs the bowler from the closet in The Man in the Bowler Hat: His History and Iconography, a wealth of cultural and social baggage comes tumbling out after it."--Esquire
"A highly diverting book."--Parade Magazine
"Entertaining and enlightening. . . . A scholarly, thoughtful, and well-documented cultural critique."--Journal of Popular Culture --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
"A study as lighthearted and charming as its subject. . . . A tip of the hat to this playful yet thought-provoking work."--Kirkus Reviews
"When Fred Miller Robinson tugs the bowler from the closet in The Man in the Bowler Hat: His History and Iconography, a wealth of cultural and social baggage comes tumbling out after it."--Esquire
"A highly diverting book."--Parade Magazine
"Entertaining and enlightening. . . . A scholarly, thoughtful, and well-documented cultural critique."--Journal of Popular Culture --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Classic Book on Hats,
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This review is from: The Man in the Bowler Hat: His History and Iconography (Hardcover)
Professor Robinson uses the bowler hat (or Derby) as the medium in understanding modernism and the modern world. Introduced in 1950 (see MR LOCK OF ST. JAMES STREET below) the hat had rather significant meaning to the emerging middle class. If Wilcox (THE MODE IN HATS AND HEADDRESS) had it right when she wrote "head attire in both sexes have from prehistoric times served to establish the individual's rank or position in society, to impress the lowly and to challenge the enemy" then Robinson's thesis of the bowler hat's profound meanings may have validity in understanding modern Western man. He furthermore explores the hat's resonance in art and literature.
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