Nice Hat/Real Life

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America's 30th president may not have spoken much, but he did know how to pick a Nice Hat.
  • Akubra.
  • Fedora, the desktop GNU variant made by RedHat.
  • The Pope.
    • Truth in Television: His Holiness has quite a few nice hats, from the modest zuchetto skullcap, to the more ornate mitre, to the impossibly awesome Papal Tiara. The Papal Tiara, in fact, has apparently been deemed too awesome for a mere human, even one chosen as God's Earthly representative. It's not been worn in the last 40 years. So the hat is Too Nice For This Sinful Earth?
    • Most of the Catholic hierarchy in some form has a cool hat they wear, with the bishops, archbishops, and cardinals all having their own style of hat.
    • The papal camauro: Pope Benedict looks a lot less intimidating (and a bit less like Palpatine) when you see him in a Santa hat. Camauro is the actual name for a santa hat, as St. Nicholas of Myra was a bishop way back when.
    • Pope Benedict XVI added a red sombrero to his myriad of hats.
    • Baseball Cap
    • Speaking of the Pope, the Swiss Guard have nice hats to go with their equally-nice uniforms.
  • The Coptic Pope.
  • The Queen. Duh. It got to the point that every time she appeared in public, everyone was most interested in what sort of new hat she had.
  • As Emperor Norton, First and Only Emperor of the United States of America would tell you, if you choose not to wear a crown, a Pea-cock feather in a Nice Hat will do. Even Death likes it.
  • The corno ducale worn by the Doges of Venice.
  • Koreans, coupled with Nice Hairdos for women.
  • Funk legend Bootsy Collins [dead link]
  • The British RAF leather helmet from the Battle of Britain. With cool goggles.
  • And who can forget about Hockey Night in Canada commentator Don Cherry's infamous fashion statements, among them the several Nice Hats like this stylish piece?
    • Oddly enough, while the hat may be insane, that's the most subdued suit I've ever seen him in.
  • John Lennon wears a Nice Hat (a cap, really) for much of A Hard Day's Night. It's nice enough that some copies of his book In His Own Write have pictures of him in that hat.
  • You should not ever mess with Napoleon when he's wearing with his trusty bicorne. Of course, Horatio Nelson also wore the bicorne of power.
  • Military officers throughout history have had Cool Hats, to go along with the rest of their Bling of War.
  • This frog.
  • Date Masamune is not just known for his one day which requires him an Eyepatch of Power. He's also known for his snazzy helmet with the crescent moon piece on the top of it. This helmet almost always appears alongside Masamune whenever he is featured in other media.
  • The various Chinese dynasties, being a multi-tiered bureaucracy from hell, featured funky-looking hats (and outfits) of all shapes and colors. Special mention goes to the ladies of the court, who would also wear fake hair shaped into a variety of mind-boggling shapes.
  • The Akha people of Southeast Asia wear ornate headdresses nearly everywhere they go: photos.
  • Terry Pratchett is often pictured in the covers of his books wearing a rather nifty black hat. It is apparently a form of disguise as without it he is, in his own words, just any other bald man with a beard. Indeed Moist von Lipwig relies on a similar technique in his Discworld books.
  • Dr. Gunther von Hagens is rarely seen without his black fedora, and has worn it while performing public dissections.
  • In North America, the wearing of men's hats as not only fashion but standard business and formal attire, began to fade during the early 1960s. One of the hallmark moments often cited for this decline in the various hats' popularity is the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in January 1961. Though Kennedy wore a full formal morning suit, including top hat, to his inauguration speech, he was most famously seen on television without a hat while delivering his speech. American men's fashion began to become more relaxed as the 1960s went on and the hat, be it fedora or trilby, boater or bowler, faded out of fashion to be replaced with naught but the baseball cap as informal attire. Though the actual impact of a new, young, and fashionable President addressing the public sans-hat (an inversion of The Red Stapler) has been debated, the popularity of the men's hat has not returned in North America or elsewhere in the Western world.
    • The hats for women, most prevalently in the South, could get pretty wild and wacky, particularly in late 19th and 20th centuries (this tradition is kept alive to this day by some, though, as noted below). In the early days of movie theaters, one common slide you'd see where today you'd see "don't smoke, don't talk, turn cell phones off, throw trash in the receptacles, fire exits are at the sides", they'd have "Ladies, kindly remove your hats", maybe even accompanied by a cartoon of some poor sod's view being obstructed by, say, a two-foot-tall pineapple-wielding monster. (As an aside, another common slide in that era would also remind people "Don't Spit on the Floor -- Remember the Johnstown Flood.").
  • Banana Republic "El Presidente" dictators tend to sport distinctive headgear, often (but not always) as part of a garishly decorated military uniform when showing up for formal events.
    • Averted by Fidel Castro, who is known for his iconic yet understated military cloth cap, although some would hold this to be a Nice Hat of it's own for that very reason.
  • The fondness of military dictators (Mussolini, Pinochet, Amin, etc.) for huge peaked caps has led to them being called "dictator caps".
    • Mussolini is usually associated with a different, peak-less cap (but then he was not a military dictator and most frequently wore a fascist party uniform).
  • Tennis players are often fond of using Nice Baseball Caps when playing. The one who began the trend was Jim Courier, with his Nice White Cap. Kind of a Justified Trope for the absolutely asinine heat in some courts, especially during the Australian Grand Slam (50 °C?! HOLY SHIT!)
  • The fierce hat Aretha Franklin wore to Barack Obama's inauguration, with the ginormous jewel-encrusted bow, which unsurprisingly became a Memetic Mutation and which is so awesome even the Smithsonian wants it.
    • It has become quite popular, The Milliner has made replicas which sell for $179.
    • African-American women are all expected to have a Nice Hat that they can wear to church (as women were supposed to have their heads covered; this was just taken to great levels in Southern Baptist churches). They are often even called "crowns".
      • In fact, a book called Crowns is all about these hats and the ladies who wear them.
  • The top hat Hugh Jackman wears in the 2009 Oscars "The Musical" musical number... or just about anything he wears, actually.
  • Just try to imagine Abraham Lincoln without his hat.
    • Not hard at all, but the stovepipe was still just so him.
    • As Lisa Simpson once described it: "America's greatest citizen summed up in one piece of clothing."
  • Disney's Hollywood Studios in Orlando has a massive version of the Sorcerer's Hat (from the Fantasia version of The Sorcerer's Apprentice) over a pair of Mickey Ears.
  • What very few people know is that the Royal Ascot horse races are actually a horse racing event and not, as one might easily be mistaken, the worlds most important annual fashion convention for crazy hats.
  • Puritan men are commonly depicted with a Nice Hat.
  • Michael Jackson's white hat counts too.
    • Or the black one, ala Billie Jean.
  • Cossack Hats.
  • Top Hats. Fred Astaire's is one of the more famous examples. It got its own song in Top Hat.
  • Zachary Quinto has a hat so well known to his fans that it has been dubbed the Fug Hat. It seems to have been replaced by a similar hat in blue, which is usually denoted as Fug Hat 2.0.
  • The Nacho Hat. Which is actually a dip holder.
  • Voice actor Scott McNeil is usually seen at conventions with a nice cowboy hat.
  • The klobuk, traditionally worn by bishops of the Eastern Orthodox Church. What is it with religious leaders and nice hats?
  • Osamu Tezuka and his beret.
  • The pharaohs of Ancient Egypt had some serious hattage going on. Aside from the nemes (aka King Tut's head-dress), there's also the White Crown of Upper Egypt, and the Red Crown of Lower Egypt. But it doesn't stop there, oh no. Eventually Upper and Lower Egypt were united, so the Egyptians went Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs and stuck one hat inside the other to make one, unifying, really Nice Hat. Brilliant.
  • Meanwhile, New York City has an entire parade dedicated to these...
  • The Knights of Columbus, an entire Brotherhood Of Nice Hats with their plumed bicorns used for formal dress.
  • One entry on Skippy's List states nothing but "Take that hat off." We can only imagine, but it was certainly some kind of Superlative Hat.
  • Since There Is No Such Thing as Notability: there's an online ESPN fantasy football league run locally out of Indianapolis that awards a huge Sombrero of Victory to whoever wins that year's championship (though, in practice somewhat similar to the handling of a certain local event's Borg-Warner Trophy, the Sombrero is not actually given over to the individual directly).
  • Whichever Ancient British chieftain wore this helmet can make a claim to this trope.
  • The Medieval heraldic crest evolved out of an attempt to turn an essentially functional tin-can into a Nice Hat, with the express purpose of making a knight more identifiable at tournaments.
  • Davy Crockett's coonskin cap, which became The Red Stapler after the Disney mini-series aired.
  • Author Amélie Nothomb wears quite an impressive hat.
  • Frank Sinatra wore a fedora most of the time to hide his thinning hair, which only added to his awesomeness.
  • Regardless of what you think about Marcus Garvey's views and plans, you have to admit that he did have an impressive hat.
  • British Royal Guards
  • Noxenlux Chapeaux.
  • WWI German general August Von Mackensen combined a Nice Hat with a Badass Mustache and Big Ol' Eyebrows.
    • Is that a skull?!
      • Yup. Standard issue for Prussian Cavalry officers.
  • Suleiman the Magnificent is consistently depicted with a turban(?) much larger than his own head.
    • He also owned an incredibly epic tiara, specifically made to outdo the Pope's. He apparently never actually wore it, likely because it was so huge that his spine would have crumbled under the weight.
  • Boxing historian and author Bert Randolph Sugar is rarely seen without his trademark fedora (and big cigar).
  • the late Isabella Blow was never photographed without a hat, and was in fact an early mentor/patron of Philip Treacy- she even got a museum exhibit dedicated to her headgear.
  • Florida Rep. Frederica Wilson, who wants the House rules amended to allow Nice Hats on the floor.
  • Swiss physicist, inventor and explorer Auguste Piccard, who inspired Hergé the character of Cuthbert Calculus in the Tintin series.
  • The Ushanka has become so synonymous with Reds with Rockets that it's become hard to imagine any Russian soldier not wearing it in winter.
  • Famed USMC sniper Carlos Hathcock was known as Long Tr'ang, or "White Feather", for wearing a feather on his hat. While the image itself might seem cliched, remember that this is a man who once shot a feared enemy sniper through his rifle's scope, performed a non-lethal shot on a courier on a bicycle from a mile away with a machine gun, wiped out a company of North Vietnamese soldiers along with his spotter in an isolated valley, crawled through an open field patrolled by enemies to assassinate a North Vietnamese general in a heavily guarded mansion, and severely burned himself rescuing several fellow Marines from a burning APC, after an exploding mine threw him off said APC. Definitely lots of cool to go with the hat there.
  • Southern Sudanese President Salva Kiir Mayardit often wears quite a nice hat.
  • Carmen Miranda
  • The "Smokey" Hat of military Drill Sergeants. Made famous by R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket.
  • Cloche hats, popular with women in the 1920s.
  • Comic Scribe Ed Brubaker's signature fedora.
  • Instead of the mortarboard hats used at graduations in a lot of English-speaking countries, Scandinavians and Finns graduate from high school wearing these, which are often decorated according to the program/school you graduated from.
  • Princess Beatrice from the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. It is headgear not to be missed.
    • It got nearly 20,000 fans on Facebook within hours.
  • The Chaperon (basically Medieval Europe's answer to the Turban) started off rather utilitarian and became increasingly complex over time. Even today, the exact nature of "its complicated construction is often misunderstood". Most people familiar with that era of history would recognize it as those ridiculous hats worn in Renaissance paintings. Its probably the inspiration for Quirrel's turban.
  • Moldavia's Eurovision Song Contest contribution in 2011... THEY MUST BE MORE THAN A METRE TALL!
  • German LARP scene has developed the "Blöder-Hut-Credo" (credo of the stupid hat). The core: "A good character concept always starts with a hat which is as stupid as possible!"
  • SPAM hat!
  • LSU's American Football team's head coach Les "Mad Hatter" Miles and his white caps that he wears while he's coaching.
  • American Football helmets have some nice designs.
    • Oh well if we're counting sporting helmets then hockey goalie helmets are never short in the awesome department.
  • Altaic/Mongolic peoples such as Buryats, Mongols, and Tuvans (see Music for Namgar) wear many nice pointed conical [dead link] decorative hats [dead link]. Seriously. Look them up.
  • The Chinese People's Liberation Army Marine Corps. While their hats by themselves are just unremarkable woolen tuque caps, they always have a pair of goggles worn over their head, and never over their eyes. [1], [2], [3]. Even if they require some sort of eye protection, they always keep the goggles on their head and instead opting for their own pair of sunglasses or shooting glasses. One might suspect if the goggles are simply there for looks, playing the Goggles Do Nothing trope straight.
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  1. ↑ "Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown" indeed.
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