ANY HAT NEWS IS GOOD NEWS…MAYBE

The country was awash in hat talk last month when Jack Abramoff had his day in court. Even though the former lobbyist doesn’t get much sympathy these days he did get a lot of publicity for hat vendors. Some said he looked like an old-fashioned Mafioso, others just thought it was weird that this soon-to-be felon was prancing around in a black fedora and black trench coat. He also inspired an article in the Denver Post, “A Tip of the Hat to Fashion Leaders.”

For those who want to read this article, indulge. If you don’t have the time, scroll down.

By DOUGLAS BROWN - THE DENVER POST

A tip of the hat to fashion leaders

He's out of money, headed to jail, loathed and ridiculed by many people who used to call him pal.

But former Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff has one thing going for him: a good hat.

He donned the black fedora with its creased crown and gently angled brim for his post-courthouse voyage through a media gantlet one recent gray day in the District of Columbia.

Abramoff has made a blizzard of bad decisions. Flopping a ball cap on his head for his D.C. court appearance, blessedly, was not one of them. He saved that moronic move for the next day, when he exited a Florida courtroom. From serious man in serious trouble to knucklehead yahoo in serious trouble, in the space of two days.

You should have stuck with the fedora, Jack.

Back when men always wore suits, men wore honest hats instead of advertisements. Fedoras and trilbys, Panamas, Derbys and homburgs. Now, men head out for a night at the movies wearing T-shirts celebrating Starbucks, and ball caps shilling for Office Depot.

The ball cap has its proper place - in the garden, on the running trail, speckling the ball field. But like an alien, invasive weed, it's rooted far beyond its native soil, and nearly vanquished the more dashing and complicated hats that once flourished everywhere in America.

All men, however, have the power to reject the ball cap’s sweet poison and cover their heads with something else - something sharp, classy, adult. First, though, a man in search of a hat must find a style. And then he must find a hat. Neither task is necessarily easy unless the man elects to wear a cowboy hat, a fine, storied category of lid with a range of styles. If you're the kind of guy who likes cowboy hats and can pull off the look they project, go for it.

Then there's the rest of us.

I started wearing fedoras now and again after my grandfather died and I found a stash of his hats. For now, I'm comfortable with certain fedora styles, definitely not the wide-brimmed ''Indiana Jones'' style, but instead fedoras with shorter brims - even the style with the shortest brim, referred to as ''stingy brim'' - and ''trilbys,'' an English hat that some people say is a fedora; trilbys have short brims and tapered crowns.

Fedoras, especially the short-brim styles, are appearing in public again, with celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Justin Timberlake and Donell Jones routinely wearing them. For the most part, these fellas aren't pairing suits with fedoras.

At The Fedora Lounge (thefedoralounge.com), a discussion board for lovers of men's hats, membership is growing by about 200 people a month, says Michael Key, who started the site.

''I think people are getting a little bit tired of the tacky slob look,'' he says. ''There's a certain move towards people having a more glamorous look.''

For generations, he says, top hats were formalwear and bowlers, Derbys and homburgs were considered casual. Early in the 20th century the boater - the kind of straw hat guys in barbershop quartets wear - claimed the casual look, and the homburgs, Derbys and bowlers began to look more formal.

The fedora arrived somewhere in the 1920s, he says, and during the next several decades it changed, starting out with a tall crown and a narrow brim, having a wide brim and tall crown in the 1930s (the ''Indiana Jones'' style), and then shrinking every decade until it was short and nearly brimless in the 1960s.

It never was considered a stuffy hat, like homburgs and bowlers had become. It faded nevertheless in the 1960s, an era that brought lots of rebellion by young people against previous generations, a president from Massachusetts who didn't often wear hats, and a lot of hair - hair that people wanted to exhibit, hair that invited extreme hat-head.

Many men's hats went subterranean for decades. When they returned, they were ball caps. The fedora may have slipped into the shadows, but it didn't die. It's ''a versatile hat, it fits into all of those camps (of formal and casual),'' says Key. ''That's one of the reasons it has remained popular.''

The persistence of the fedora can be traced to its identification with Hollywood icons like Humphrey Bogart and with the classy and sophisticated Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s. The fedora looked great on those guys, and some contemporary men say hey, if it worked then, why not now?