There Are People Wearing Acrylic Hats by Eugene Wyatt

November 2004

Winter is wool hat weather.  Wool is a natural protein fiber that comes from sheep and is renewable, growing continually.  It is shorn from the sheep once a year and in another year's time it is shorn from the sheep again, so it goes and has been going like this for millenniums.  Wool is also compostable; it's decomposition into simpler elements nourishes other living things.  Acrylics and polyesters are synthetic fibers made from petroleum based chemicals. Like all plastics they are not renewable and nourish nothing. They are terminal products, even after recycling which is nothing more than their transformation into other synthetic products.  At the end of their cycles they end up in a landfill or some other reservoir of pollution like the air, water and soil of our ecosystem and  will remain there for tens of thousands of years, poisons to living things.  When you wear a hat knit from a polyester yarn, you wear an oil well on your head.

A hat must fit the head, it must feel comfortable, it must flatter the face and coordinate its wearer.  Acrylic and polyester hats are uncomfortable, they develop a noxious odor when worn for a period of time and they itch.  Hats knit from coarse wool itch too.  The 'prickle factor' of wool, the threshold of the itch sensation, is broached by fibers whose diameters excede 30 microns.  The itchiness of coarse wool is what some people refer to when they say they are "allergic" to wool.  Their skin is irritated by the fibers and  the 'rash' they experience may be caused by their incessant scratching.

Color has spatial and temporal situations too. Lately I like to see people wearing 3 mismatching reds, it harmonizes me. In Monet's La Grenouillere, see the vermilion poppies against the viridian foliage over the sunlit, cobalt blue water in the afternoon shadows of this Summer bathing scene with women strolling along in long bustled dresses under sun hats.  I would like to be at La Grenouillere but I'm in the Met and the painting is next to others that don't move me and there are people in the gallery wearing acrylic hats that influence how I see the vermilion poppies, how I harmonize the moment.

Melinda tries on a hat knit from an indigo-dyed yarn.  The color works, it's right for her skin, her hair, her scarf and coat.  And it works because it makes a conscious moment for us on a cool, clear afternoon in Union Square between Stanley's endless vegetables and Beth's good jam.  Everything touches everything else, past and present, neither good nor bad, our world works and it pleases.

Eugene Wyatt

Eugene and Dominique not wearing acrylic hats.

Catskill Merino wool used in collaboration with Bollman Hat Co. and Kangol.