THE BERET WEARER INVITES, WITH little effort, the imputation of baldness. A. M. Gautam, a writer and habitual wearer of berets he sources from Bengaluru’s Church Street, scoffed at the suggestion. If the beret was worn with the intent to deceive a prospective paramour, he says, “any successful outcome” will involve throwing it off: “It’s a very illogical and, I would say, risky thing to do!”
To wear a beret, in general, is to court risk. Where the hat lacks any organic cultural mythology—as in India—it registers as a brazen act of self-assertion. In 2001, the Times of India consigned it to the status of a “military spin-off.” The fact that Dev Anand often wore one did little to rehabilitate the beret. It could only go so far in persuading people that its wearer was chic, and on Anand, it was irredeemably camp, too thoroughly his to mean anything beyond him. Even Shah Rukh Khan, with his succession of diaspora roles that send costume designers scrambling for hackneyed continental swank, never quite embraced so glaringly anachronistic an accessory.
The beret, though slighted in this country, was as essential to the European artist as his silhouettes. In all his publicity images, Charles Frederick Worth, the designer who made haute couture a formidable enterprise, wears a beret and a waning hairline. For Worth, who “saw himself as an artist,” as Valerie Steele writes in Encyclopaedia of Clothing and Fashion, the beret’s task was, perhaps, to make everyone else see him so, too.
When Rembrandt made the hat his trademark, it was démodé as they come. In Rembrandt by Himself, the art historians Christopher White and Quentin Buvelot speculate that he wore it to present his image as belonging to an earlier time, setting himself apart, as any master is wont to do. The hat went on to become a general mark of artists across the seventeenth century. Not all of them were bald.
For anyone hobnobbing on the Left Bank in post-war Paris, the choice of hat was routine. The rakish Ernest Hemingway wore one to belong. Even so, a beret à la Hemingway on his mistress irked the writer Harold Loeb. “Hem usually wore a beret,” he snarled on seeing her in one. The hat, it appeared, did not appreciate being borrowed, least of all by the woman over whom the two men were in competition.
The other infamous libertine, Pablo Picasso, though, did not wear it for consensus. He had the good fortune of a moment that rewarded such anachronism. In his case, as in that of many poets and artists to come, the beret confers authority not in spite of its anachronism but because of it. To wear one is to announce, bereft of apology, that you answer to an older and higher court than the present.
The Raja of Khetri, Abhimanyu Singh Alsisar, tells me there’s a proper way to wear a beret, though he’s too courteous to correct anyone who gets it wrong: “It’s not the right thing to do. And I’m a very proper guy.” A proper guy who shows up to every dinner in a kurta, a dhoti, and an old-world hat. His father, who served in the Armoured Corps, wore black berets, so now he wears “only black berets.” His being a Rajput is something he feels compelled to remind me of: “I’m a Rajput. We have a lot of weapons and we have a lot of Jeeps and we have things which, you know, look cool like that.” In the prince’s world, headgear relays “what kind of a person you are,” depending on your “style of tying” and how “neat” you are. But tying a 30-metre Shekhawati ki pagdi, an endeavour he says only he knows how to do well, would mean taking “more time than your wife” to get dressed. The forgiving beret a affords him the same distinction.
“Every artist wants to stand apart,” Gautam says, and “pretension” is part of the gig. You have to play the role to be the role. When the founders of the Black Panther Party watched a World War II film about the French Resistance, they perhaps realised that to play the revolutionary, it would not have sufficed to dress in the agreeable Sunday Best that participants of the Civil Rights Movement had settled on. The party opted instead for an arresting, insistently masculine ensemble of leather jackets, sunglasses, weapons, and, of course, berets. The assemblage made for such compelling “good visuals” that J Edgar Hoover, then director of the FBI, declared the party “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”
In India, though, the beret didn’t have cachet; it is not the most pragmatic choice for the climate. Our military fashions are a fraught inheritance, the hat a natural carryover from the colonial past. Its associations had to be abstracted from the militaristic for it to become civilian, which it never quite did. Instead, it became cosmopolitan, a different proposition entirely, as it called attention to a lineage that had nothing to do with geography. To claim its historical meaning of intentional, dissident selfhood, the discriminating beret-wearer had to actively reject the hat’s local connotation of ranked khaki.
Dilip Chitre, the Marathi poet, described as possessing a “diabolic energy” and a body of work preoccupied with “the death of villages” and “the pangs of new city life,” could hardly have chosen a more fitting hat. All the beret ever did was rail against forgetting. To a profiler, the beret was “indispensable” to the poet’s image. Everyone bought what the beret-wearer sold without compunction.
“If I were a marketing professional… I would say [the beret] gives you consistent brand identity,” says Gautam. To imagine him without one strikes one as indelicate. Half-jokingly, he adds he might mix up “[his] online presence with beret and without beret” to avoid the prospective dissonance. The beret, to Gautam, is a “totemic thing” that convinces him of the “story” that he’s a writer. It convinces us, too.