fine here you go: SUDDENLY, HAT!

let it never be said I don't give people what they want.

I think one of the best hats is probably the opera hat, for reasons that will soon become apparent.



In about... now.

Okay so I don't know if you guys know what opera glasses are, but they are (in their most original form) this:

and a lot of them usually collapsed, like so:

This pair is 999 dollars on Amazon. I highly encourage you all to leave classy archaic reviews. But don't overdo it.

I have a (cheap) pair I got at an awesome thrift store that are more like binoculars (like later opera glasses)

they collapse too.

But there is also a thing called an opera hat

whatever happened to style?

and it also collapses, like so:

Till I collapse / I'm bein' a hat / for as long as your hair be / Till the day my springs pop / don't you ever stop wearin' me

I do not own one (YET) because it is very expensive, even for opera hats that aren't all that good (I've seen new ones for about 900 dollars at least).


Now it might have occurred to you that it is strange that so many things associated with the opera are collapsible, but actually there is a reason for this. Due to a slightly archaic stipulation in the London Fire Code of 1667, all performances of a theatrical nature had to be able to, in an emergency, escape in a caravan that was only modestly over-sized (I believe those were the exact words; I'm not sure how the size was actually judged). This rule covered anything in the "area" of performance--including the audience.

So essentially the role of theatre fashion for several hundred years revolved around getting people to fit into spaces with as little extra as possible, which is why for so long corsets became absolutely central to fashion and why not being satisfied with anything less than the smallest waistline was desirable (the push-up action, while incidental, didn't hurt either, of course). I guess the idea was to... stack the women like Lincoln Logs or something? I don't know.

 I really don't

Anyway, men, too, had to cut down on space. You may not know this, but men wore corsets as well.

After the practice ended, Teddy Roosevelt wore one for a day to see if it affected his manliness. You be the judge, but remember you're not looking at an actual picture.

But men also liked being able to see from the cheap seats and having hats (the women were probably just glad to be out of the house, especially in Victorian days), so the devices that allowed them to do those things ("binoculars" and "hats," respectively) had to be made collapsible. Now it's true that there are quite a few opera glasses that aren't collapsible, but those were mainly reserved for Lords, who could get away with that sort of thing because they were huge jerks who wrote in a loophole (and even those usually had at least collapsible handles or something). Needless to say, there was probably an unspoken agreement among commoners that, in the unlikely event the Earl of Wherever's opera glasses became a problem, they would be used to beat him to death. At any rate, the original opera glasses collapsed, and so do mine. Mine also have the advantage of being reminiscent of Johnny 5 and Wall-E.

So that's why I like the opera hat. For one, if you do that thing in cartoons where people sit on top hats, guess what? You're okay, dude! Maybe. It's like built-in Hat Insurance. Also, they've got a cool history behind them. And they're just so damn classy.

I mean, they combine the best things in a hat (classy and cool) and then throw in a bonus feature (springs!). They're the DVDs of hats.

So yeah, opera hat all the way.



Buy me one, please.