PEAKED INTEREST

A CAP IS NOT JUST A THING ON THE HEAD. IT’S A BILLBOARD OF INTENT, WRITES CLIFFORD ROBERTS.

One of the first caps most commonly seen, but no necessarily recalled as such would be that of English King Henry VIII. Yes, he of the many wives, but also of the portrait in white stockings, hands akimbo and the grandiose “Cap of Maintenance” that denotes nobility. The headpiece was made from Italian velvet, embroidered with actual gold and stiffened with whale baleen. HENRY VIII

The New York Times really described it best when an article published in 2015 referred to the humble baseball cap as the Common Man’s Crown.

It’s difficult to imagine a time when the baseball cap wasn’t the go-to noggin-cover, but of course there were plenty. Just think of your earliest memory of Frank Sinatra and those of his ilk, and the image is just incomplete without that tilted snap-brim fedora. “Angles are attitudes,” is a quote often attributed to the man of whom the book The Way You Wear Your Hat was published in 1997.

Like all the cap’s predecessors, hats are more than mere practicality. They’re fashion, and fashion by its nature is impossible to predict. In head-gear, you really need to know your taqiyah from your trilby. The development of the most commonly worn hat today, the baseball cap, didn’t happen in a straight line. Plus, it has a family tree of note. Need a cap? Choose from a newsboy cap, apple cap, duckbill cap, ivy cap, ascot cap, stocking cap, trucker-style, snapback, fitted cap, and more.

A good timeline are the characters that feature in the story along the way; those who have shaped fashion in their being among the most visible. Across the Atlantic “pond” during this time, another cap was being worn that would famously be remembered. The early 1800s was a time of European colonisation in the US and Davy Crockett – folk hero and frontiersman – was one of its stars. Ironically, his so-called coonskin cap was traditionally Native American. 1

4Another famous cap was the one painted in 1830 by Eugène Delacroix atop the head of Liberty Leading the People. Think French Revolution and you’ll immediately have the image: a lass – hair, tri-colour, dress and, ahem, breasts, all billowing in the wind. That Phrygian cap was quite possibly one of the places headdress first came to be recognised as more than just worker-class attire, but veritably anti-establishment. 3 Now, you’re probably not familiar with her, but one can’t begin a story in the middle. It’s worth noting the first step in the road. While the first actual hat discovery is dated to around 3 300 BC, the carvings in an ivory figurine Venus of Brassempouy, discovered in France from 25 000 years ago, are regarded as quite possibly the first head-covering. VENUS OF BRASSEMPOUY LIBERTY

DAVY CROCKETT HAT’S OFF TO THE CAP

Of course, no story about this type of headdress would be complete without reference to the great Mr Sherlock Holmes’ deer- stalker. Arthur Conan Doyle created the character in the late 1800s, but left assumptions about the specific headgear to readers and illustrators. The cap itself is famously made of tweed, but is a style that only sticks around if you want to be accused of dressing up. SHERLOCK HOLMES

Caps had another route of development via the military, of course. Bicornes, tricornes and naval wallahs eventually gave way to far more practical. Here there are plenty of examples. In real life, caps became melded with the ideology of workers as leaders. Mao Tse Tung, Vladimir Lenin, Fidel Castro and even Joseph Stalin helped entrench the cap as statement. In the movies, you had John Wayne in WWII movies and of course that great fictional and comical terror of the oceans: Captain Archibald Haddock, created by Belgian cartoonist Hergé as the perfect foil for his Tintin in 1941. CAPTAIN ARCHIBALD HADDOCK

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And smokin’ hot were two words also often used to describe Tom Selleck, the man who single headedly sparked a new wave of moustaches. As Thomas Magnum, he also did a whole lot for solving fashion indecision. Magnum, PI was an American crime TV series broadcast in SA in the 1980s, with Selleck as private inves- tigator in the idyllic setting of Hawaii. His dark blue cap - envied by every 1980s teenager – was emblazoned with the calligraphed letter D, logo of the Detroit Tigers baseball team. MAGNUM PI

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And that goes for presidents too. Depending on your particular bent, you might have accepted Barack Obama was cool when he wore a cap and Donald “Make America Great Again” Trump not so much. Nonetheless, they all do it for the same reason. They still try to fool us all when they don the common man’s crown. DONALD TRUMP

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PHOTO: Manfred Werner

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Charlie Brown It was around this time that Charles M Schulz created Charlie Brown and the Peanuts comic strip; a time when the modern baseball cap is said to have been born. It too had a natural evolution, but the new, more structured cap was a break from the floppy version worn by players since the early 1900s. CHARLIE BROWN

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Again on the big screen, Marlon Brando helped the cap stick in our memory – more so than the actual name of the movie in which he wore it: The Wild One . This one is more in the older style; big and saggy with a shiny peak. Not quite something Justin Bieber might venture out in, but back in 1953 it was smokin’ hot. MARLON BRANDO

The 1990s brought the advent of Samuel Leroy Jackson in Hollywood and the precursor to whole different cap culture to the world. He might not have invented the back-to-front wearing of the flat-cap, but he certainly helped export it to the world post-Pulp Fiction. The look was so iconic that unless you were a rock- star, like the modern-day deerstalker-wearer now sporting a slick new Kangol, you would inevitably be lambasted as Jackson wannabe. SAMUEL L JACKSON

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In South Africa, the cap took another weird turn in the late 1990s. Although we’re still waiting to see a chain of long-bill leopard-print baseball caps at airports worldwide, Zander Tyler, aka Jack Parow, made his mark. Even the zaniest things can become acceptable... ZANDER TYLER