No other style of hat, before or since, not even the ubiquitous baseball cap of recent years, has so effortlessly crossed the economic barriers of English society, blurring class boundaries and helping to forge new identities among working people. Never solely associated with one particular style of dress, it proved one of the most versatile pieces of headgear ever invented.

The bowler hat first made its appearance as the hard hat designed by James Lock and Co. of 6 St James’s Street, London, in 1850 for Sir William Coke, to give his gamewardens to wear when patrolling their employer’s estate on horseback. The Locks’ design was made up by hatters Bowler Brothers, whose family name was adopted for the new style. The story goes that when Coke was first presented with the hat at the Locks’ premises, he threw it to the floor and stamped on it to test its hardiness, before ramming it down on his head and leaving the shop, evidently satisfied. It had cost him 12 shillings.

It was initially, then, a practical hat, to protect the head from the attentions of poachers’ sticks and collisions with low-hanging branches, rather than a fashion item. The Locks referred to their design as a Coke hat, after the client for whom it was designed, but it was the manufacturers whose name became associated with it ever since, largely because of the happy coincidence that their name seemed to chime with the bowl-shaped appearance of the hat. Its resilience also gained it the short-lived nickname of the “iron hat”. In the United States, it was known as the derby (rhyming with “Kirby”), because it became the headgear of choice at race meetings.

Prior to the advent of the bowler, hats were easily readable markers of social distinction. Members of the gentry wore top hats, while the working man traditionally wore a flat cap. The bowler hat changed all that. Precisely because it had been designed as a working hat, it became the adopted business uniform of a whole number of different trades. The image of the city gent going to work at the bank, with rolled umbrella, carnation buttonhole and bowler, is a familiar one to us still, but what has been lost to collective memory is the extent of bowler-wearing among the working classes. Street-traders, omnibus drivers, wet fish sellers, shipyard workers, knife-grinders, and others: all sported them as uniform and protective headgear.

Famous wearers: Chaplin to Glam Rock

Just because it was such a universal style, both here and in the United States (and also, to some extent, in Europe), the bowler became the trademark hat of a number of popular figures. Charlie Chaplin’s cane-twirling tramp would scarcely be complete without one, and neither would Laurel and Hardy. Much of the double-act’s funny business revolves around the indispensable comic props of their hats, which are repeatedly crushed, punctured or blown off their heads, often ending up getting interchanged in the ensuing muddle. Oliver Hardy’s aura of inflated gentility is emphasised through old-world courtesies such as his comically elaborate raising of his hat, and his abashed removal of it and clutching of it to his chest to indicate cringing remorse.

After the demise of formal hat-wearing by men in the 1960s, bowler hats came to stand for a certain comical fustiness. They had become just what they hadn’t been prior to then, exclusively the preserve of the professional classes. The civil servant going to work at the Ministry of Silly Walks, played by Monty Python’s John Cleese, naturally wears a bowler hat, as does Dad’s Army’s Captain Mainwaring (Arthur Lowe), when in his working garb as a bank manager. The mysterious Old Etonian government agent John Steed, played by Patrick Macnee, in the original TV series of The Avengers (1961-9) wears a reinforced bowler that doubles as bullet-proof protection and a handy weapon.

Notwithstanding this reversion to a middle-class conservative image, the bowler enjoyed a certain alternative-culture status in the 960s and 1970s, when it began to be seen on some unexpected heads. In Bob Fosse’s 1972 film of the stage musical Cabaret, Liza Minnelli’s Sally Bowles – an American nightclub singer in a sleazy Berlin dive during the onset of the Nazi era – wears a bowler hat with fetishwear during her performance of a song called “Mein Herr”. On Minnelli, its gentle hint of cross-dressing introduced a racy, erotic side to the bowler, while in Stanley Kubrick’s long-banned film of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), the bowler hats affected by the amoral gang of thugs led by Malcolm McDowell become ironic symbols of violent social dissidence.

In 1974, inspired by the Clockwork Orange look, Cockney Rebel lead singer Steve Harley wore a bowler for a Top Of The Pops performance of the group’s hit single, “Judy Teen”. The hat now assumed a kind of camp stylishness that fitted in perfectly with the anything-goes aura of early-1970s Glam Rock.

Where did you get that hat?

Outside England, the only culture in the world that still prizes the bowler hat as an essential item of everyday wear are the Aymara women of the Bolivian and Peruvian highlands. The traditional dress of full skirts and woollen tops (voluminous shawls over cardigans) is thought to have been adopted from Spanish settlers of the 17th century. But where did the brown felt bowler hat, or bombin, come from?

The story has it that, in the 1920s, a Bolivian outfitter accidentally ordered too many derby hats, and decided to market the surplus ones as women’s wear. Within a decade, they had caught on so tenaciously that an Italian millinery firm, Borsalino, began making bowlers specifically for export to the Andes. Now they are manufactured locally. Oddly, most wearers appear to favour a size that looks far too small for their heads to the western eye. The Aymara women believe the hats enhance fertility.