Textile texts: Knights in the skyscraper forest

The recent European Football Championship was once again a complete disaster – as far as hairstyles are concerned. Who’s surprised! The head has always been the problem area for common kickers. He can use this part of his body to get a ball into a net; Expressing thoughts, on the other hand, regularly overwhelms him. When it comes to sentences with more than ten words, he babbles off to the sidelines.

But we shouldn’t blame the footballer for this. In a highly specialized society, everyone has to find their niche talent. You wouldn’t expect a tax clerk to be able to cut up a pig and process it into tea sausage.

The misdeeds that the footballer commits on the hair on his head deserve less leniency. A Rudi Völler has remained in the collective consciousness less because of his center forward qualities than because of his mullet (short at the front, long at the back). Ball-skilled Florian Wirtz is threatened with a similar fate. He too is a victim of the scissors. His current, well, hair design is fatally reminiscent of Jim Carrey’s cooking pot cut in “Dumb and Dumber.” The fact that many of his teammates obviously go to the same hairdresser doesn’t make matters any better.

Men used to have it easier when it came to hair. When there is a debate about “headscarf girls” today, one should remember that covering the hair of one’s head also has a long tradition in Christian culture. Wearing headscarves in public was still widespread in the 1950s. It was unbecoming of a woman to let her long hair blow and flow in the street.

This also applied to the opposite sex – outside the bar and office, men wore hats. The men had the advantage. While the headscarf does not benefit a woman aesthetically (which is intentional: the woman is supposed to appear more asexual and therefore less attractive to other men), they benefit from the head covering. A hat visually enhances a man. It hides the fact that underneath there is a boring short haircut or, worse still, a deep receding hairline or a bald head.

A hat visually enhances a man. It hides the fact that underneath there is a boring short haircut or, worse still, a deep receding hairline or a bald head.

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A fashionable hat can also distract from the fact that the suit is off the rack and the shoes have seen better days. Yes, it can even give a face that special something. Did someone shout “Humphrey Bogart”? In just 25 years he made around 80 films. But he became an icon through a single scene: the farewell to Ingrid Bergman in “Casablanca.” It was the hat that gave “Bogey” the coolness that enabled him to be highly emotional without appearing sentimental.

The secret lies in the brim. It creates distance and casts a shadow over the eyes, making them less easy to see. This creates a protective zone. Which is why Bogart naturally wears a hat in his second star role – as private detective Philip Marlowe in the Raymond Chandler film adaptation “The Big Sleep”. This is how he keeps the world that disgusts him at a distance.

There are enough reasons for this disgust. The world of work that liberal feminists like to glorify (“Women should also have the right to become career pigs”) has always been a limbo. This year, this is often covered in hygge language (“work-life balance”, “team building”, “family-friendly working time models”) in order to suggest a feel-good atmosphere. In fact, the galley chains only receive a plush covering.

The men of previous generations were still aware of this professional misery. Billy Wilder only needs a minute and a half to illustrate the desolation of an office worker’s life in the opening scene of “The Apartment” (1960). But as soon as desk worker Jack Lemmon leaves the unholy walls of an insurance company behind him and puts on his hat, he goes through a metamorphosis. Then the hat becomes a helmet and the trench coat becomes an armor to face the hostile skyscraper world.

That’s the moment when you realize: All the black and white films in which cool heroes wear hats are actually knight films. They show men trying to remain decent, with integrity, under difficult circumstances. That’s why the farewell scene from “Casablanca” still affects us today. Sometimes we would like to be as chivalrous as Humphrey Bogart. But how is that supposed to work without a hat?

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