Like the Princess of Wales I, too, experienced a “very intense emotional reconnection” as the result of her recent Scouts-focused foray in the Lake District. Hers came from nature, and was evidently the more desirable variety of feeling all the feels. Kate found “balance” and a “sense of peace” courtesy of that ravishing landscape, apparently. That’s what she said on the video she released to promote the work of the Scout Association, of which she — with the Duke of Kent — is joint president.
Mine was a rather different, er, “reconnection”, and it was with an emotion that may best be characterised as disgust. This was stimulated not by those fells and glaciated valleys — alas no — but rather by the baker boy hat that the princess had for some reason chosen to wear while navigating them. What I reconnected with was the disgust of my youth, a youth that featured far too many baker boy hats. Peace? I haven’t been able to get this travesty out of my head since.
Why oh why? That’s the question I have for Kate, or the one that’s polite enough to rehearse here. Suffice it to say the actual question rattling around my head right now is not for public consumption, never mind royalty. If the princess doesn’t want us to talk about what she wears, the reason Kensington Palace stopped releasing details of her outfits in February, maybe don’t give us quite so much to talk about.
Admittedly I am perhaps not the most rational commentator when it comes to this particular accessory. I have a longstanding problem with the baker boy hat. No one looks good in one, not even Kate. Indeed, come to think of it, perhaps I should be thankful for the greatest sartorial leveller around, a piece of headgear that turns the great and the good-looking — from David Beckham to Keira Knightley by way of assorted Peaky Blinders — into a Hovis-adjacent embarrassment.
The Peaky Blinders had their reasons, of course, or rather their reason. The Birmingham gang that inspired the TV series would stitch a blade into the peak of their cap to pull out in a fight. What anyone else’s excuse may be is unclear to me.
Anne Hathaway’s adoption of a baker boy hat in The Devil Wears Prada was supposed to cement her evolution from fashion faux pas to diva. For me it signalled that you can take the girl out of the “cerulean sweater” (google for the best fashion scene in all film, if you don’t know it) but you can’t take the cerulean sweater out of the girl. Sure, hers was by Chanel, but it made Hathaway’s Andy Sachs look not chic but desperate.
What’s the appeal? My theory is that there’s an odd high-low thing going on, whereby county types think it makes them look everyman (or, as in Kate’s case, woman), while the everyman thinks it makes them look county. What neither group understands is that what it actually makes them look is a total fright.
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To be honest I can’t even begin to rationalise the handful of fashion types who sport one. I blame the posh brand that gave some away a few years ago. When oh when will the last of those darned caps die is the question I and assorted other naysayer frowers ask each other every show season.
I had extensive early exposure at my suburban comprehensive, where the so-called townies loved a baker boy hat. Those of us who were referred to as “Bristol” wouldn’t have been seen dead in one, or even near one. “Bristol”, to explain, was used as an adjective — as in, he or she is “so Bristol” — which didn’t mean that someone lived there, necessarily, but just that they looked as if they did. (This was a city that was just a few miles away and at one and the same time light years apart.) Death by baker boy cap may have had a literal meaning in interwar Birmingham but it had a metaphorical one in 1980s Bristol.
This is not a mindset I have laid to rest, as you can probably tell. My primary problem with a friend’s husband, for example — a perfectly nice man, if I am forced to admit it — is that he wears a baker boy hat. Horror of horrors, he once actually left it behind at my flat. I felt some kind of covenant had been broken. I couldn’t breathe easily until I got that hat out of there. Even minus the blade, it wielded near enough the same psychological portent as Tommy Shelby’s. As I said, a total fright.
I know. I probably need to get over it.
@annagmurphy
