Club Obi Wan

The trilby is a slightly rumpled fedora accented by a tapered crown. Due to its usually being unlined and constructed of very lightweight felt, the trilby is not as stiff as the traditional fedora. It can me molded into any shape or even rolled up and stuffed into a small pocket.

The name came from George Du Maurier's novel, Trilby, which was dramatized in 1895. The play set into motion an enormous Trilby craze. As a result many things - soaps, taffy, cigars, societies, etc. - were named Trilby. Countless baby girls were christened Trilby, and pets, particularly cats, were named for her hypnotizing husband-mentor, Svengali...

The origin of the hat itself was explained by a reporter for the Bradford Daily Argus in November 1895.

'I have been puzzling my head to account for the reason of so many soft hats being worn at present, and at last hit it. It is another phase of the "Trilby" complaint. In one of the illustrations of the book, "Trilby" wears a hat of this desciption, so it has been seized upon by those worshippers at the shrine of Trilby whom nature will not assist in the cultivation of a Svengali beard.'

The trilby is supposed to have a deeper psychological significance as well. Historian James Laver attributed a sexual symbolism to men's hats, noting that men have worn high hats during periods of male dominance whereas:

'With the advent of the New Woman in the 1880s many men adopted the boater, which might be thought of as a very truncated top hat. And toward the end of the century men began to wear, so to speak, the very symbol of their bashed-in authority: the trilby hat.'

Others have stuck to a more aesthetic perspective regarding the hat's virtues. "The trilby is the most expressive hat a man can wear. It can be jaunty, sedate, or sporty," noted Arthur Grodd of Paul Stuart, which had continued to sell hundreds of trilbies annually through the late 1980's.

YARVTON wrote:All Trilbies are Fedoras, though not all Fedoras are Trilbies.