The Gospel According to the Hat

There’s a special place in Hell for people who wear hats indoors. Not the unthinking ones – the farmer who forgets to take his cap off in the pub, or the pensioner shielding his pate from the glare of the bar lights – but the deliberate ones. The ones who do it for “the look.” The ones whose hat isn’t an accessory but a mission statement.

George Galloway’s hat, for instance, deserves its own peerage. A black fedora, permanently welded to his head, as though at some point it fused with the scalp and became symbiotic. He wears it not as clothing but as punctuation. It’s the full stop at the end of every pompous sentence. It says: I am not merely a man – I am an event.

It’s theatre, of course. Every time Galloway tilts that brim, you can practically hear the inner monologue: Revolutionary… rogue… raconteur… The hat completes the illusion of gravitas, the way a stage prop completes a pantomime villain. Without it, he’d just be another ageing showman with a pocket full of grievances and a voice trained in the art of rolling R’s like thunder. With it, he’s a caricature – a 21st-century Trotsky in trilby drag.

He’s not alone. Boy George wears a hat as if it’s a licence to be eccentric. It’s become his emotional firewall: the wider the brim, the thicker the armour. And The Edge – a name that already sounds like a parody – has made the beanie an emblem of tortured artistic authenticity. You can almost see the equation forming in his head: Hat + guitar pedalboard = mystery.

What unites these men is the delusion that a hat can elevate the soul. It’s the belief that millinery can manufacture depth. The truth, however, is brutally simple: a man who wears a hat indoors is telling you, without words, that he has mistaken style for identity.

You can date the decline of Western seriousness to the moment we stopped laughing at this. Once upon a time, removing your hat indoors was a basic act of civility – a mark that you’d left your vanity at the door. Now, it’s a costume piece, part of the theatre of self.

The problem isn’t the hat – it’s the need for it. The compulsion to signal, to brand oneself, to disguise emptiness with fabric. It’s the same syndrome that gives us politicians in hard hats on factory visits, pop stars in balaclavas, and middle-aged pundits in cowboy hats preaching authenticity from a Shoreditch café.

So yes – let’s talk about Galloway’s hat. Because it’s not just a hat. It’s the crown of the hollow man, the dome under which self-importance ferments. The next time you see it glint under studio lights, remember: underneath all that felt is nothing but scalp – and a desperate need to be noticed.