Even with today's disdain of hats for either women or men for normal dressup occasions, most of us still have a few hats hanging around. Mine are all garden hats. Jordann wears one here, but there are plenty for all of us. Joe has a few golf hats and baseball caps. When I was growing up, my mother wore hats to church, weddings, and funerals, and Daddy always wore a felt Fedora. We see glamourous hats worn at the Kentucky Derby or Fascinators perched on the side of British heads at formal functions. When I attend estate sales I sometimes see entire walls of hats and veils of every style that some matron kept for years, probably in the hope they would "come back." I have attended teas where ladies were asked to wear a hat, Easter functions where we were asked to make one, and the dressup box here has several. Somehow, if you change nothing else about what you are wearing, putting on a hat suddenly says something about who you are, or what you want to imagine being.
Maybe that is one of the reasons for the expression which arose in the mid 1900's which alluded to wearing more than one hat, (functioning in a different or more than one capacity or position). This metaphoric expression alludes to headgear worn for different occupations or occasions.
We all wear more than one hat whether we have one on our head or not! Multi tasking is not really new, is it?
