Branded Male

Bring back the bowler

The other night I dreamed that I was searching for a missing bowler hat. I have never possessed such an item, so I don't know what the dream signified. All I know was that the hat was rather stylish - in charcoal grey - and that I looked good in it. I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be the case in reality.

The humble bowler is currently so unfashionable that - like the polka dot bow tie - wearing one would be a radical statement. Which means that it's likely to come back into favour at any moment. The cast of the new film The Brothers Bloom might give the bowler rebirth a nudge. Although they don't all wear bowlers, they have the correct bowler-wearing attitude: dapper and slightly eccentric.

There's something humorous about a bowler, which is perhaps why it's quintessentially British. It was, of course, designed by Brits: London hatmakers Thomas & William Bowler, to be precise. It was designed to protect gamekeepers' heads against low-hanging branches. Before that they wore top hats, which kept getting knocked off. Onlookers would then burst out laughing, which offended the gruff gamekeepers' sensibilities.

Bowlers soon become the acceptable headgear of the middle classes: not as snooty as a top hat and not as casual as a flat cap. Smart yet indestructible, they were adopted by butlers and City gents. In America they were known as "derbies", after Edward Smith-Stanley, 12th Earl of Derby and founder of the Epsom Derby horse race. (That may be the connection, because I was born in Epsom. How Freudian.)

The Surrealists - especially Magritte - were quick to alight on the paradoxical nature of the bowler, which is both anonymous and subversive. It has occupied a significant place in popular culture ever since. In the sixties, the actor Patrick MacNee wore bowlers to rakish effect as the super spy John Steed in the cult series The Avengers (left), which also had surreal undertones. 

More recently, Pierce Brosnan looked dashing in a bowler in the climactic sequence of The Thomas Crown Affair, one of the few remakes that doesn't insult the original. The Parisian fashion designer Sonia Rykiel often includes a bowler in her catwalk shows. And last season she (or rather her daughter, Nathalie, who is now the brand's designer) sent out a whole parade of bowlers.

In fact, now I think about it, bowlers look even better on girls. 

When Rubens had it ruff

Peter Paul Rubens was a colourful character. Just drop into the Flemish master's old house in Antwerp - as I did last weekend - and you'll see what I mean. Artist, entrepreneur and diplomat, he founded a "school" of apprentices to turn out paintings on an almost industrial basis (just like Damien Hirst) and married a vivacious 16-year-old when he was 52. His life was almost as baroque as his work.

He was also something of a snappy dresser. Rubens considered himself a professional rather than a bohemian, and he dressed accordingly. The southern Low Countries were ruled by the Spanish at the time, and this influenced fashion. Men wore dark, close-fitting doublets and a contrasting white ruff - a wheel of pleated cloth that looks very odd today but was all the rage at the time. As well as preventing the doublet from becoming soiled at the neckline, it forced the chin up, conferring a dignified appearance.

The folds of these ruffs became so complicated that they were often supported by a scaffolding of thin wire called a supportasse. The wire was abandoned after the discovery of starch - and as time wore on the ruff became more streamlined. Eventually it lost its stiffness and drooped to the shoulders, looking less vulture and more Saturday Night Fever.

Ruff or no ruff, with his pointy beard and piercing gaze, Rubens had the effortless style of a man with a heightened visual sense. His beautiful Italian-influenced palazzo adds to that impression: as does his orderly garden, with its wooden lattice structures and tended plots. Last Sunday, in soft autumn sunlight, it was full of rust, brown and ochre shades, faintly melancholy and yet deeply pleasurable. Much like gazing at one of his paintings.