Thanks to George W. Bush and former Conservative party leader William Hague, the baseball cap and the adult male head now seem to go together like, well, George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton. And yet what recourse is there for a follically challenged male as winter arrives? After all, 30 per cent of body heat is lost through the head. An answer comes from some unexpected quarters.
What connects Brad Pitt, Steven Spielberg, Oasis's Liam Gallagher, Daniel Craig and the catwalks of Antonio Marras and Yves Saint Laurent? The flat cap, of course.
"The flat cap is what no other hat is - it is a hat but not a hat at the same time," says Niels Van Roogen, clothing and accessories director of Holland & Holland. "The flat cap isn't shouting too much."
Allon Zloof, owner of New Urban, says: "Baseball caps are too young and often too branded for most men now, while the flat cap still has strong associations but is simply more versatile, slightly retro, handier than an umbrella, something of a statement without being too attention-seeking and easy to wear."
Certainly the market seems to be expanding rather than contracting.WhenZloof'sfather,
who had founded an eponymous head wear business, retired six years ago, his son relaunched the company as New Urban, focusing on flat caps and, latterly, trilbies, and sales have escalated.
"It's certainly losing its association with older men and because it's so convenient, it's becoming more of an everyman style now," says Tim Boucher, owner of Bates Hats in Jermyn Street. "In fact, people are coming in and saying that they're too young to wear a hat but are more than happy to wear a flat cap."
Indeed, whether you call it a scally cap, as it is sometimes known in the US, a cheese-cutter (New Zealand), a coppola (Sicily), a sixpence (Norway) or a plain old cloth cap, the flat cap has been one of the few hat styles to become almost the stuff of stereotype for both ends of the social spectrum. It is as much associated with the working man, for whom the flat cap was universal during the late 19th and early 20th century (picture Reginald Smythe's long-running comic strip character Andy Capp), as it is with the tweeds-and-wellies set, who adopted it during the 1920s and favoured it for the rigours of country sports. Groundsmen would wear a flat cap with a specific tweed pattern as a mark of affiliation to their manor.
No wonder fashion, always looking up or down the social scale for inspiration, took notice. As Nic Hayes, design director at Kangol, one of the biggest manufacturers of branded flat caps, says: "Those associations are always going to turn some people off the flat cap, but give it a modern twist and it's a new take on the traditional English worker look - whether it's working the land or owning it - that is a core part of fashion in the UK."
This adaptability may also explain the flat cap's successful migration across disparate pop cultures, from skinhead to hip-hop via, perhaps most unlikely of all, heavy metal - Brian Johnson, lead singer of AC/DC, has made the flat cap a signature style.
Hayes says there are a few factors that make the flat cap such a winner: its flattering shape works with most faces and heads; there are bolder patterns now available that are "moving the flat cap away from the farmer image"; and that there are many different ways you can wear it. The semiology is powerfully varied: you can wear it at an angle, with the peak turned up, even backwards (though maybe that is best avoided now).
Certainly a flat cap is not just a cap any more. James Lock & Co, probably London's most famous hatters, sells four key styles: a Great Gatsby-style eight-piece "newsboy" cap with a central button; a sleek, narrow-peaked cap; a more rounded, draped style, "which compensates for an excess of face with an excess of fabric," as Patrick Lamb of James Lock says; and one cut deep at the back to secure it to the head in case the wearer is looking up at a steep angle (during shooting, for instance).
"Even when you're buying a cap, you're buying an image," says Lamb. "The balance between cap and physique has to be right. The secret is to always wear one that's bright and perky - that's ahead of you in confidence."