Fashion Hats

The encyclopedia of world costume
The Homburg was still seen but a plainer version without ribbon edging was more usual: in America this was called a fedora, in England , a trilby. ...

This history of world costume defines and describes designs, materials, accessories, and manufacturing techniques, placing them in historical perspective, and follows the development of tastes and the recurrence of motifs

Michael Stipe's Last Stand - An REM Exit Interview

You're a 51-year-old man. Not much hair. Glasses. You've been doing the same job for nearly 30 years. You've decided you've had enough – you could just go, throw in the towel, do a proper Reggie Perrin. Instead, you're saying goodbye to every last person, on Newsnight, BBC Radio 2, XFM.

And now you're saying goodbye to me. It's a Friday afternoon, the Connaught Hotel, Mayfair. I'm sitting in the lobby with a ten-dollar suitcase, heading home after this to my family home in South Wales. To a bedroom where, as a teenager, I would listen to badly-taped copies of Automatic For The People , Murmur and Green , cassette reissues on I.R.S., bought with two weeks' paper-round money, overlooked by a strange face, ripped from Vox Magazine, of a man with a hand over one eye. Marked in black, with this list on it: Buck, Mills, Berry, Me.

Berry has long gone. Buck is back home. Mills is here, but down the corridor. Michael Stipe is right in front of me, sitting on a sofa, a golden-brown trilby next to him, ringed with black ribbon. I've heard he can be surly, awkward, offish; in his gentlemanly jacket and shirt, he is anything but. He checks my name. He smiles readily. He ticks off his publicist for confirming a schedule, promising me it won't eat into our time. He is at pains to create comfort – an unusual boon for an interviewer with only a thirty-minute slot, as well as the teenage me, who has thankfully stopped squealing.

Source: The Quietus