Club Obi Wan

Found this Fedora in old photo in a Tiger tank reference book. The guy is driving a Tiger II during factory testing. Hopefully you can see it well, I took a photo of the picture.
http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x36/ ... C00979.jpg

Great photo but strange looking. Not the headgear you expect someone to be wearing. I saw a show on tanks once where they brought back WW2 tank drivers and let them have another go. This photo reminds me of that because they were driving the tanks in their civies of course (but no fedoras). Many commented on how small tanks were.
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Canada

Great picture. Perhaps that was one of the engineers that was test driving it. Did you notice that the front pinch is tight?

I head someone say once on another board that the tight Indy pinch was not era accurate. I always thought that particular fellow was not an old film fan. I have seen scores of tightly pinched fedoras in the old films on TCM. Indy's tightly pinched Raiders fedora was no anomaly as some have assumed.

In regards to this, I watched the old Bogie film, Sierra Madre, if I recall correctly. I had read that this hat was one of the inspirations for the Raiders fedora, but never saw the similiarty, until my last viewing of the film a week or so ago. It is similiar to the Raiders fedora in pinch style. It was tightly pinched, at least for a few frames in the film. Perhaps that is where Deborah got the idea from? Fedora

One of my favorite movies of all time. But Fred C. Dobbs obviously picked his hat up by the crown...

I loved the film, but never really liked his hat. On the other hand, his own personal hats he wore in some of his film gets a thumbs up. Also I got the title wrong. Brain fart, from an old fart. Fedora

The worn area you see at the top front of Bogie's crown is VERY typical of old, well-used fedoras. I just recently retired my granddad's old stetson that looked nearly identical and my own stetsons (from the early 80's) looked about the same when I retired them.

It is a combination of picking them up by the pinch AND having formed too tight a crease to begin with. Most of our "Raiders" style fedoras will look like this if we continue to wear them because the creases are simply too sharp. That said, it seems EVERYONE always puts sharp creases in their fedoras, so it's just a part of the life cycle of a hat.

When it's no longer dressy, it becomes your fishing hat and when it finally starts to fall apart you finally retire it. Most of us simply accelerate this life cycle by starting the hat out with creases that are too sharp.

The bash in Last Crusade, by the way, would please my haberdasher who always hated that I stressed the felt too much. That bash is much more reasonable and safe for the hat.