Top hat

Thomas Coutts, famous as the founder of the bank Coutts & Co., would have been in his seventies or early eighties when this hat was made for him. Contemporaries in the early nineteenth-century noted that he dressed very unfashionably and shabbily for a man of his wealth and position. His personal style was updated late in life by his far-younger second wife, the actress Harriot Mellon, whom he married in 1815.

The top hat first appeared at the very end of the eighteenth-century and remained the dominant form of masculine headwear, with a few changes in style, for the next hundred years. The rounded chunkiness of this example is characteristic of the early form of top hat. Its composition of beaver felt is also very typical of the topper's initial style, and its sober colouring is appropriate to the personal tastes of Thomas Coutts, who was by the standards of his day very elderly when the hat was made.