Fashion 87 : A Man’s Hat Can Be Crowning Touch

My black hat is my crown

Symbolizing my sound.

Symbolizing we don’t play around.

Lyrics by Run-D.M.C.; Published by Profile Records Inc.

At a moment in fashion history when the fate of men’s hats seems to be hanging in the balance, Run-D.M.C., a rapping rock group, has taken a stand. As their lyrics and the fact that all three musicians wear and collect hats would suggest, they are doing their part to bring about a major headgear revival. And they are not alone.

Let fashion dictates try and make men’s hats obsolete, as they have tried in recent years. Members of Run-D.M.C. want to be counted among those men who do not feel quite complete without a hat. Whether for luck, or attention, or to set a mood or simply keep their heads warm, there are plenty of other men too who collect and wear hats no matter what the fashion.

Jason Mizell of the rock group reports that he has about 20 styles arranged on his bedroom wall “like posters,” and he says he will always wear them. He and his group even produce their own line of velours and soft tweeds to sell to fans during concert tours.

Theirs are more flamboyant than most hats making headwear news this spring. But the fact that any styles at all are making news is enough to give loyalists hope that hats are on their way back to the top.

Among collectors, styles run the gamut, and even the most outlandish hats or caps are likely to be worn--and some worn a lot.

Tommy Lasorda has a gift certificate good for a free gall bladder operation. He traded a Dodger cap for it. He says he agreed to the deal--even though he doesn’t need the surgery--because he understands why the doctor had to have the hat.

“Put on a certain hat and a transformation occurs,” Lasorda explains.

Lasorda goes through at least three Dodgers caps a season, saves his lucky cap “for when the going gets tough” and keeps a supply of “civilian” tweeds and fedoras for the off-season.

Now consider Larry Hagman. While he has his custom-made cowboy hats for “Dallas,” he also owns about 1,000 others, including a baseball cap with a built-in battery-operated fan and another with a raccoon--a whole raccoon. He says his disapproving wife has tossed out at least 500 others from his “gag” collection.

Hagman doesn’t wear his hats to be in fashion. He wears them to stand out in a crowd. “People look at you in a hat,” he says. “You get reactions.”

He considers his a museum-quality collection, and he plans to display part of it in custom-made end tables shaped like large, glass cubes. His vintage military and law-enforcement helmets will go inside.

Marshall Goldberg is a hat-wearing Capitol Hill lawyer-turned-television scriptwriter. He says: “I think of a hat as costume. Wearing one is like acting, in the sense that all the world’s a stage.”

He admits it takes guts to walk around in one of his wide-brim felt hats from the 1930s, even though it helps transport him to an era he wishes he had known firsthand.

“People judge you harshly; it’s like driving a big car,” he says. “You have to overcome their judgment or you’ll never wear a hat.”

In case you’re wondering what you would be missing, Goldberg says: “Put on a hat and you’re having fun without depending on anybody else to approve or disapprove.”

Some men have fish stories; Jeff Melvoin has fish hats. “Half the fun of fishing is what one wears while fishing,” he says.

He keeps a selection of styles in his office near the set of “Hill Street Blues,” where he is a co-executive producer. But when he takes off for Idaho’s trout streams, he has only his L. L. Bean Mouse River hat with him. It is shaped like a fedora, but made of beaver pelts.

“Every fisherman has his prize hat,” Melvoin explains. “It’s the one that got its crown crushed on the Snake River when you had a five-pound fish on the line, then got dented and stained up in Michigan on some other fishing trip. It’s the hat you’d risk life and limb to rescue if it ever blew off.”

He started his 35-piece hat collection as a junior in high school when “Hang ‘em High” Clint Eastwood was his hero. The all-leather cowboy style Melvoin found in a Big Sur shop reminded him of the one Eastwood wore for his Westerns. Whatever may become of the others, Melvoin says, he plans to keep his first.

“Hats like that represent experiences and chapters of my life,” he says. “I’d find it difficult to part with it.”

Melvoin wears the baseball cap of his hometown team--the Chicago Cubs--when he goes out of doors.

Other collectors, Al Pick among them, don’t have such an easy time of it. Few of Pick’s hats are fit to wear in public, but that is part of what he likes about them. “It’s the silliness of them that appeals to me,” says the Los Angeles lawyer.

Pick’s headgear collection consists of more than 50 zany oddballs with stories attached. There is the thinking cap with the light bulb on top, which was a gift from his sister. He owns a big straw style, which somebody lugged back all the way from the Philippines, even though it is stiffly structured and would not fold up in a suitcase. His hard hat came from a friend who got it from a telephone repairman. “The guy couldn’t find it when he was leaving my friend’s office,” Pick says with a mischievous grin. His cardinal’s hat has nothing to do with the baseball team. Pick got his from the Vatican. “I’m a whimsical sort of person,” he says.

He could steal the limelight with his loony lids, but he prefers to wear a basic baseball cap in public. He leaves showmanship to men like Hagman, who say they can handle it, or to men who have something to hide.

Hagman says: “When I see a man in a hat, I assume he’s going bald.” Pick says he assumes the same thing.

By the way, bald men may be trying to keep it a secret, but there is nothing to the old idea that hats encourage baldness. Dermatologists now say the amount of hair on a head is determined by hormones and inherited traits, not the lack of oxygen a hat imposes on hair follicles. Dr. James Sternberg, an associate professor of dermatology at UCLA, suggests that in the future, genetic engineering will do more than fashion to enhance the appearance of bald-headed men.

Even if Sternberg’s prediction comes true, Sid Felsen isn’t likely to get rid of his hats. There are people who know him well but have never seen the top of his head. He keeps it under his hat at the dinner table too. But Felsen says it isn’t to hide his lack of hair.

He wears a hat for his health. The owner of the prestigious Gemini GEL graphics studio in Los Angeles, where blue-chip artists Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and others make limited-edition prints, explains: “I was a sun freak until 15 or 20 years ago when a doctor said I had to get out of it.”

Out of the sun, Felsen is forever getting into conversations with bald-headed strangers about the shades of conflict their special condition creates. One recurring issue has to do with air-conditioning versus the anger of theater audiences. (Movie houses are among the few places where Felsen concedes to pressure and removes his hat, only to weather the blasts of cold air that invariably blow around his unprotected head.)

A more pleasant situation occurs at parties, he says, where he removes his hat when women introduce themselves, then ask if they can try it on.

Of the several dozen, wide-brim styles he owns, he buys most of them in London during trips to Europe’s art fairs. He says they have helped him develop his signature dress. He wears a hat, a sweater (instead of a jacket), and a pair of buff-colored, suede oxfords wherever he goes.

Felsen never stopped to ask himself whether he likes hats. “It’s like asking if I like photo-realist painting,” he says. “If it’s well done, I like it.”

’ Loyalists like Felsen aside, the fact remains: Hats have not been making fashion news in recent years.

President John Kennedy pushed them out in favor of a boyishly bare-headed look that came to represent youthful thinking in the early 1960s. But they went down in defeat much earlier, according to one theory. Hat historian Louis Fisch, who manufactured men’s hats in Los Angeles from the ‘30s to the ‘50s, says: “The boys came back from World War II and swore they’d never wear hats again.”

Those who have worn them nonetheless say it has been difficult, swimming against the tide. But now, by sheer coincidence, the tide appears to be shifting.

“The felt-hat era is gone for good,” admits Chuck Bailey, whose L.A.-based hat company manufactured the first “mouse ears” caps for the Mickey Mouse Club’s Mouseketeers in 1955 (but specializes in mainstream styles). Bailey says he sees the beginning of a new era among hat wearers and adds: “Ten years ago, our average customer was over age 60. Now he’s under age 30.” The brisk business is in what Bailey calls “life style” or “beach” hats.

At the Field Co., another local hat manufacturer, Jim Field says he makes between 20,000 and 30,000 such hats a month. They feature custom-designed prints and logos made to match specific surfer- and weekend-wear clothing by companies, such as Maui Sport, Catchit and Life’s a Beach. College kids are the best customers of the style, Field says, and he finds that they collect beach hats in landlocked Iowa as well as along the coasts.