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"Hats are having what they call a moment. I credit\u2014some might say blame\u2014Alexander McQueen, who topped the terrific Victorian bruiser looks in his Fall 2009 menswear collection in Milan with a terrific Victorian bruiser's take on a homburg. Not entirely street-legal for '09, perhaps, but it looked great on the runway. Then, two weeks later in New York, the stylists at Z Zegna and Diesel Black Gold offered their own variations on the trend with oversize bowlers. But, as Godfrey Deeny points out in the Financial Times, it's not just a catwalk thing. The ever-vigilant Deeny spotted no fewer than seven hats on the dance floor of Beatrice Inn.\n\nThe question is, why now?\n\nWhy this resurgence of a vanishing accessory? We're talking proper hats here, after all, not wool beanies or\u2014God forbid\u2014baseball caps. Is it the buffer they provide against a cruel world? A return to dressing up? The delayed effect of all those shots of Pete Doherty looking elegantly wasted in his pork-pie? I leave that to future sociologists. I can only speak from personal experience. Now, I like to think I was ahead of the game here. Ever since I misplaced my hair a few years ago\u2014or, as Toby Young more accurately puts it, settled on a new, permanently shorter style\u2014I've been something of a hat fancier. Purely for protection from the elements, you understand; nothing to do with personal vanity. Up till now, my headgear of choice has been the functional but quietly rakish flat cap. But a few weeks ago, I decided it was time to buy a real hat\u2014the sort with a brim, the sort men used to wear before JFK decided that his locks were so luxuriant and electably photogenic that it wouldn't do to put a lid on them.\n\nWhere to start? Well, in New York there really is only one place to start. I'm sure there must be others, but I'm only aware of one full-service men's millinery store in Manhattan. That would be the J.J. Hat Center on lower Fifth Avenue. There I put myself in the hands of a splendid old-school salesman. He wore a fedora, looked like he'd been around long enough to remember when he could count his peers on more than one hand, and rightly treated me with gruff indifference until he'd ascertained I wasn't wasting his time. Coincidentally, the actor Patrick Wilson was the only other customer in the store at the time.\n\nDutifully I tried on a couple of fedoras, but what I really had in mind was a pork-pie, a model so squat that you don't feel you're wearing the sort of old-fashioned job that doomed JFK's opponents. J.J. Hat Center has a particularly handsome version called the Four Corners. Made exclusively for the shop by Biltmore in Canada, it combines the pork-pie's traditional stingy brim with an elegantly blocked diamond-shaped crown. I took it in black and removed the feathers from the hatband. That was the easy part. Deciding on the correct size took a good deal more hemming and hawing. After all, you don't want to wear your hat so low that your ears are holding it up, but at the same time you want to avoid what the wife calls \"pea on a drum\" syndrome.\n\nHaving debuted my new hat to compliments from the ladies and only mild sniggers of derision from my so-called friends, I think I understand where this trend is coming from. At a time when many of us are, excuse the phrase, \"shopping our closets\"\u2014just the other day I had an old Thom Browne suit shortened a couple of inches to make it seem fresh\u2014the right topper is an instant, relatively inexpensive way to spruce up the wardrobe. Now, I know what you're thinking. Even before the hat was having a moment, the pork-pie had achieved an annoying ubiquity among the hipster set (that Pete Doherty again). But I'll ignore that. I like to think mine makes me look like Popeye Doyle, battered but defiant, and not like those other six guys on the Beatrice dance floor.\n\n $175, available at J.J. Hat Center, 310 Fifth Ave., NYC, (212) 239-4368, jjhatcenter.com\n\nFor tips on how to buy a hat, see GQ's informative guide.\n\nFor tips on how not to wear a hat, see Details' fedora edition of \"Cool or Tool?\"\n\n DIRK STANDEN Photos: Elissa Wiehn (hat); Marcio Madeira (runway); Kobal Collection (Popeye Doyle)"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/stuff-we-like-the-four-corners-hat>