The Best Berets For Men And How To Wear Them
Yes, berets. Stand to attention, arty-intellectual, comedy Frenchman who’s just missing a baguette, berets. But before you go anywhere, hear us out.
There’s been a veritable array of berets over the past few seasons. Designers from high-fashion establishment Prada to streetwear provocateur Gosha Rubchinsky, Louis Vuitton to Grace Wales Bonner via Missoni and Alexander McQueen have all proposed the polarising headgear du jour; on the high street, Cos and ASOS have both nodded to it. So reluctantly, incredulously, we at FashionBeans find ourselves writing a guide to wearing them.
Arguing that “they fail to fulfil the most basic function of a hat – namely, to keep one’s head warm,” The Guardian’s fashion maven Hadley Freeman gave her unambiguous verdict back in 2012: “A beret on a man is ridiculous.”
And yet, even the most card-carrying, dyed-in-the-felt beret denier must confess when spotting a guy wearing an old-school Kangol beret à la Jackie Brown-era Samuel L Jackson, teamed with a black leather biker jacket, chunky burgundy roll neck and dark jeans to thinking it looks, well, cool.
John Lydon
Berets may put some in mind of late seventies sitcom Citizen Smith, with Robert Lindsay playing a young Marxist who styles himself as ‘the Che Guevara of Tooting’. But berets can evoke more serious activism, from the actual Che Guevara to the leather-jacketed Black Panthers – the latter feeling particularly timely, what with campaigning filmmaker Spike Lee collecting his Oscar and BAFTA for BlacKkKlansman in berets with a purple suit (a Prince tribute) and tuxedo respectively.
The unswerving Lee’s been wearing berets for years, of course, but their wider popularity has picked up of late. Grime and garms don Skepta rocked a Loewe beret on the front of a fashion magazine, while Hollywood A-Lister Michael B Jordan – AKA Killmonger in Marvel blockbuster Black Panther – has cover-starred in the Basque style by esteemed London hatters Lock & Co.
