Hats off to attitude

I realised the other day that I didn't know whether Frank Sinatra wore a fedora or a trilby. I was shocked at myself, I really was.

Imagine some people think all fashion knowledge is useless knowledge, so who cares which memos you miss?

But the concept of fashion is founded on the notion that a delicately calibrated hierarchy exists within the realms of uselessness.

But not all useless facts are created equal — and it is clearly declass to be up to speed on where Gwyneth Paltrow claims to eat noodles (at Koya, in Soho) and chocolate brownies (at The Albion, in Shoreditch) and yet not be able to put a hat name to a true fashion icon.

Sinatra's hat is, as you undoubtedly knew, a fedora. A trilby has a shorter brim at the front. The fedora is more 1950s' rat pack, the trilby is 1980s' ska musician.

Short-brimmed hats, trilbies had the edge over fedoras for years, with Pete Doherty as the unlikely poster boy.

But the wider-brim hat is staging a comeback.

Kate Moss often wears a fedora these days. Brad Pitt, too, seems to have graduated to a fedora.

Fifteen years ago a khaki trench and a fedora looked a bit old-hat, a bit 1940s'-detective-dress-up — now it's looking pretty much bang-on trend.

The beauty of wearing a hat is that it is the way you wear it that matters — a side tilt for mischief, a down tilt for mood and an upward angle for openness.

"Cock your hat," Sinatra himself said, "angles are attitudes."