Trilby, Homburg, & Pork Pie Hat Guide

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Discover the top three hats we highly recommend you add to your hat collection. The Trilby, Homburg, and the Pork Pie.

Wool felt trilby hat
Wool felt trilby hat

The Trilby Hat

Also referred to as a sloucher or slouch hat and named for the heroine of an 1894 novel by George Du Maurier. The trilby is sort of a little brother to the standard fedora. Like the fedora, the trilby also features a creased tapered crown with a front pinch but it’s slightly more streamlined with a shorter snap brim which usually features a simple sewn edge and sometimes a very narrow band across the bottom of the crown.

Originally associated primarily with the trench coat, the trilby evolved in the 1920s to a softer hat worn often in the English countryside and also at the racetrack. For these reasons, it’s typically seen as a slightly more informal hat than the standard fedora but not by much. In recent years, small trilbies with very narrow brims often printed in loud patterns across the hat and made from synthetic materials became a popular fashion item, however, these types of trilbies also quickly developed something of an unsavory reputation and brought the standard fedora down with them to a certain extent.

However, if you stick to wearing a classically styled trilby, as I do for most of my own personal hats, you’ll be able to overcome this stigma. Also, they do look particularly good on men with strong facial features so take that into consideration as well.

Homburgs have stiffed curled brims and grosgrain bands.
Homburgs have stiffed curled brims and grosgrain bands.

The Homburg Hat

Next to the top hat, the Homburg is the most formal of all men’s hats. It’s named from the German spa and resort town where it was first seen and also where it was popularized by King Edward the seventh when he was then still Prince of Wales, on vacation in the 1890s. Proper for both day and evening wear, the black or dark blue Homburg is worn with a dark business suit, stroller suit, or tuxedo depending on the occasion and also pairs well with a Chesterfield overcoat in winter in other various colors.

Churchill in Grey Homburg with lighter colored edge trim
Churchill in Grey Homburg with lighter colored edge trim

The Homburg is constructed with much more stiffness than the fedora and features a brim with a slight curl around the edge that’s also typically faced in the same sort of ribbon that you’ll find around the crown. Speaking of the crown, the homburg’s crown is typically very tall and also features a center dent. A favorite hat of diplomats and politicians like Winston Churchill and also featured prominently in The Godfather film series, the Homburg typically looks best on old and more distinguished gentlemen as well as men with defined facial features. You can still wear a Homburg if you have a rounder face, however, just try to find one with a slightly lower crown and a bit of a wider brim to balance things out.

Pork Pie Hat
Pork Pie Hat

The Pork Pie Hat

Also called the English pastry hat, the pork pie got its name from its telescoped crown which features a slight lip around the upper edge of the crown and therefore looks similar to a traditional English meat pie. Normally featuring a snap brim, pork pies flourished among college students in the 1930s and were also popularized by Hollywood stars like Fred Astaire and Cary Grant as well as jazz musicians like saxophonist Lester Young who was elegized by his contemporary bassist Charles Mingus in the 1959 song goodbye pork pie hat.

Lester Young
Lester Young

Pork pies also have a strong and storied association with sporting events particularly horse-racing furthermore, the golfer Sam Snead was often known to wear pork pies made from straw often in coconut and featuring bands with colorful patterns like Madras. Pork pies are definitely on the more casual end of the spectrum as full brimmed hats go and they can tend to give the wearer a slightly squat appearance. As such, shorter men and men with rounder faces should exercise caution when wishing to wear a pork pie.

There’s a basic overview of these three different styles. We’ve given you a few general tips already on how to wear each of them but here are a few more pieces of advice on how to wear all of these types of full brimmed hats with confidence.

Assorted hats
Assorted hats

Tips To Wearing Hats With Confidence:

Many men are hesitant to wear traditional full brimmed hats for one primary reason, they’ll look out of place or dated. It should be said that this fear isn’t necessarily completely without merit. If the hat doesn’t match the rest of the outfit in terms of formality, is not being worn with the proper detail like snapping the brim down for example, or doesn’t correspond well to the wearer’s face shape, it will look out of place.

Confidence is key, however, and if you pair that confidence with the following tips, you’ll be sure to be able to wear any of these styles with relative ease.

  • As these hats all have sizeable and styled crowns, they’re generally well suited to shorter men or men with a stockier build. As they elongate the face, draw the eye upwards, and overall, give a more vertical appearance.
  • As far as the brim is concerned, remember that this is the feature of the hat that should most directly correspond to your own specific face shape. In general, though wider brims typically complement long oval faces whereas narrower brims pair well with shorter rounder faces and as you may have picked up on earlier, men with strong and chiseled facial features are lucky in that they can get away with wearing pretty much any style of these hats.
Short-brimmed hats are not ideal for people with big ears like Raphael
Sven Raphael loves to wear hats
  • In terms of pairing these hats with your outfits, you can’t go wrong and coupling them with traditional coat and tie ensembles whether that be a full suit or a combination of sport coat and odd trousers.
  • Because of the sporting heritage of trilbies and pork pies, they go well with more rustically styled outfits especially ones featuring tweed or layered with a sweater.
  • Color-wise, brown is a very safe bet for both trilbies and pork pies whereas the more formal Homburg will typically look best in black or very dark blue.

Out of the styles that we covered today, which one do you think that you might be able to incorporate into your wardrobe first?

Reader Comments

  1. I’m an inveterate fan of hats and wear them. I wear only vintage Borsalino or Dobbs Fedoras and Homburgs. I’d never wear a Tilby or Pork Pie….those are Pinky Lee hats.

  2. What type are you wearing in the photo Sven? Looks like a fedora with a barrière brom than is customary

  3. Confidence is what I need to wear one. I’m on the fence. I’d like to get one, I really would, however my confidence is lacking…

    1. Tell that to the three women (two of whom had dates) who were eyeing me the other night as I left a restaurant with my wife, or the dozen or more I noticed doing the same at the theatre afterwards. Medium grey suit, blue/silver tie, dark grey wool overcoat, black scarf, grey rabbit fur Stetson fedora. Laugh all you want…

      1. Last week, on my way to the office – Dark Grey suit, navy blue long over coat, rabbit fur grey fedora, black band (Dobbs). Stop at a convenience store for a cup of coffee for the drive…Woman at the Counter, “It’s so nice to see a man in a proper hat”. Caps (IE Baseball) are for athletes and kids. HATS are for men

  4. First, thank you for this article–I wish more style writers would write about hats more often. Most men today know nothing about hats, so any information is better than none. However, I would like to say that I find this article, like many others, has fallen into the trap of being overly specific and categorical. I use the terms trilby, porkpie and Homburg all the time, but to really understand hats, these terms need to considered only in a very general way if not altogether ignored. What happens to a Homburg if you pinch the front of the crown—is it still a Homburg? What happens to a porkpie if it is given a bound and curled brim—is it still a more “casual” hat? At what proportions does a trilby magically become a fedora? It’s a mistake to believe that these categories define every hat. Many hats defy categorization because their combination of style elements were never specifically recognized as being a “fashion.” Many different elements combine in a multitude of ways to create the look of every hat, including the height and taper of the crown, the way it is creased and dented, the width and styling of the brim, the colour and finish of the felt, and how the hat is trimmed with ribbon and other adornments. When one thinks about hats in this way—as a combination of style decisions—the fashion categories have little meaning. And of course, as always, context is everything.

    1. Dear Stephen, thanks for your comment. What happens to a Homburg if you pinch the front of the crown—is it still a Homburg? I think the English call it a Lord’s Hat ;). Of course one can mix elements and the distinctions are often fluid and not distinct but we still think it can help to have different hat categories that can help to choose the right hat for the right occasion. Of course, there is always an exception to the rule but it’s good to know the rules first.

  5. As a child in the 1960ies and a youth in the 1970ies I never noticed hats went out of fashion because all the men in my family continued to wear them. So hats were just a common sight. I bought my own first hat when I was about 15, a fedora in Cape Town and a tweed “Deerstalker” (if you don’t know them: google “Sherlock Holmes”) in Edinburgh at the long gone “Dunn & Co.” And later my first straw hat at “Ryder & Amies” in Cambridge. They’re all still with me. Over the years I must have amassed some 100 hats and I wear them daily.
    Last year a little boy in the street looked up at me in awe and asked. “Are you a detective?”

  6. As the old saying goes ” If you want to get ahead ,get a hat ”
    The other one is fools rush in .
    I would suggest if you are considering a hat do some patient work and decide how you want to look underneath it .
    How tall are you ?
    What is the shape of your head ?
    Visit a hat shop with a good selection of quality hats and try a few and then go away and think about it .
    I know after many years now that in my own country we have one of the worlds most famous hat makers ; Akubra , for some reason they don’t suit so I have to wear a Stetson , either a Whippet or a Stratoliner .
    Let the hat compliment you , not accentuate you or change you into something you are not simply for the sake of wearing one .

    1. Hey Mark, have a look at Akubra’s “Hampton” hat. It’s a small brimed Fedora. I have a few and love them. You can get them from The Hattery in Katoomba.

      1. Hey Simon ,
        It is the block on the Stetson that I prefer .
        My Dad’s best mate had a very famous now long gone hat shop in Sydney . It closed about 40 years ago . I worked with him on Saturdays in the shop and I learned a lot from him . Hat styles are about the best you look good in . Maybe look at the two Stetson’s , only to say you know of them . Nice to hear from you .

  7. I regret I don’t see men wearing anything but baseball caps these days. Trilby is not a term we used among my people, but we all wore what we called fedoras that would take in your definition of the Trilby. I was forbidden to wear a homburg until I was 50. That was the rule back when… and pork pie hats were considered a joke, though I think they’re quite jaunty. For casual wear, we would use the standard cloth cap, high on the back and sloping to a round peak at the forehead. I wear that all the time now in the winter and a wide-brim Stetson-styled hat in the summer. It’s wonderful that modern summer wear can have mesh crowns to ventilate the head; the solid crown is so oppressively hot in summer by comparison. I would love to see the return of the variety of hats you describe. It seems however to belong to another age.

  8. Thank you folks for your advice on hats. I have what is called by some people a hat face, i.e. one that easily goes with a hat, which is why I like wearing one – with a Duffle Coat or a traditional charcoal grey overcoat. Looking for something more like an Ulster, but these things take time.
    Anyway, as it so happened I called into a hatmaker’s in Bamberg, Franconia, Germany just last Saturday and got a Trilby hat. And it was such a pleasure to be served there. They still make their own hats and so they started by measuring me up, something even good general outfitters rarely do these days for hats, anyway.
    Then, I was asked what shape and colour and style I wanted and after the usual ‘excuse me for a few moments, I’ll just get something for you from the stock room’ back she came with not less than seven hats, all made in-house. Talk about being spoilt for choice for I could have gone with any one of them.
    Talk about freaking out when finding something in your size.

  9. As always another interesting and informative video. In my (narrow) experience, the historical trend seems to be that the trilby is British and Fedora American. Having picked up a Dunn & Co. pigskin trilby (immaculate after a quick india-rubbering down of some dust markings) for a bargain price of £3.50 last Saturday, there are some excellent finds in charity shops and vintage emporia in my part of England. Have refused two British Warms from the same place, I am still awaiting to find quality for a price I am prepared to pay (Dunn & Co.’s were melton twill, but this was not necessarily so from other manufacturers). The hat will go well with one (taupe and suede). Just need my wife to let my buy a tweed jacket (scores out there!) and I’ll be made up. Thanks gents.

  10. The biggest problem, is where to purchase the hat or hats at. Please start to put Links to companies who sell the items in the article or at the end of the article

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