Fashion today - thanks to the New York Times

Fedoras Fly and Trilbys, Too: Downtown Tips Its Hat to Harlem
By GINIA BELLAFANTE

Published: August 17, 2004


hen Rod Keenan arrived in Manhattan from Kansas more than a decade ago, transported by dreams of becoming a kind of contemporary Charles James, he took to the benighted habit of wearing a hat, a practice that yielded certain demographic discoveries. Generally speaking, his encounters with mockery took place in locations south of Morningside Park.

"I'd be walking around downtown, and people would give me a weird look or say `What is up with that hat?' " Mr. Keenan explained last week at his West 122nd Street town house. "But in Harlem, where there is a long tradition of formal dress, I'd always get a `Hey, man, nice hat.' "

Fortunately for Mr. Keenan, who is one of the city's few custom men's hat makers, such geographic divisions no longer hold. At a time when formality is hardly the order of the day and presidential candidates campaign for office as if the whole of their wardrobes derived from the Gap gestalt, traditional men's hats including Panamas, fedoras and newsboy caps, among other iterations, are experiencing an unforeseen resurgence.

The current issue of Cargo, the new fashion magazine for young men, features a model in a plaid suit and a two-toned golf cap on one page, and another scouring a library shelf in a tweed trilby from Lands' End on the next. Mr. Keenan has watched with some fascination as his traditional hats have turned up in eccentrically minded style publications like Flaunt, as well as in Maxim and Stuff, men's magazines that pay little attention to the foppish.

I guess you can finish the article yourself on the NYT site if'n you're interested,....
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/fashion/17DRES.html?8hpib