Fashion: The Shapka

The streets of big cities in the nation’s cold belt this year are abob with something dashing and radical in men’s headgear: shapkas—fur hats. They are worn not by visiting Russians but by venturesome Americans who have discovered that the shapely shapka has the advantage over the standard felt hats: it is warm and comfortable.

The shapka became fashionable in a small way back in 1959, when Britain’s

Prime Minister Harold Macmillan visited Moscow. A man of infinite sartorial taste, Macmillan wore a white lamb’s-wool shapka that he had bought in Russia 30 years before. Moviegoers also liked the way the shapka looked on the stone-bald head of swashbuckling Actor Yul Brynner in The Brothers Karamazov.

By now, men who are notoriously conservative in choosing their business clothes have decided that the shapka is acceptable, even somewhat sophisticated. More and more men are wearing them downtown—in Washington, Chicago, New York and Boston. Eager to keep the boomlet going, importers and U.S. manufacturers are supplying a variety of styles, mostly in greys, blacks and browns, that range in price from $85 for a karakul number to $3.95 for a bargain-basement ersatz fur. Following their own mysterious impulses, women also seemed to have got that Slavic feeling: the most conspicuous new hat style on female heads this winter has been a high-fashion version of the shapka that looks like a furry coal scuttle.

The men’s styles are naturally squatter, and masculine. A big seller is the cuffless Macmillan (also known as the Ambassador and the Astrakhan), though men can choose from the cuffed Alaskan (also known as the Troika and the Stockholm) and the round Pillbox (also known as the Detroit and the Arctic).

Sensible as it is in wintertime, the shapka requires some daring from its wearers. For, though the hat is worn all through Scandinavia as well as in Russia, many Americans associate it with Communism and the cold war. In Manhattan last year, a man in a shapka got on a subway train and sat down, whereupon a woman near by hissed: “Goddam foreigners!” He never wore his shapka again.