CHAPEAU!

As the fall collections made perfectly clear, you no longer have to be a little mad—or belong to a royal family—to leave the house looking like this.

- BY EMILIA PETRARCA

When Leonardo DiCaprio boarded a water taxi to go to Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez's Venice wedding in June, he was almost unrecognizable.

He was dressed in typical black tie, but on his head was an all-black Los Angeles Dodgers baseball cap, the brim pulled down to his chin, obscuring his face. Of course, this only made the paparazzi hound him more—hiding under a hat is a trademark DiCaprio move—but in this context his accessory may also have been perceived as impolite. Was the outspoken environmental advocate ashamed to be associated with the Amazon founder and his ostentatious wedding? (We can only assume the cap came off during the ceremony.)

There has never been a period in history with so many people wearing hats and, at the same time, so few rules dictating where, when, and how. In the past you could fill a book with the nuances of proper etiquette. Men, for example, were expected to remove their hats inside residential elevators—always by the crown, never the brim—but not in public or commercial lifts. In London women attending weddings could take off their hats only after (and if) the mother of the bride did. To be fair, this was also an era when wearing “brown in town” was verboten.

“That is out the window now,” says Ben Dalrymple, managing director at Lock and Co. Hatters in London, one of the oldest hat shops in the world (it was founded in 1676). He has seen a considerable uptick in interest, especially from younger generations inspired by vintage Bond and the