Gat, Korea's celebratory hat

Beginning

Cross the dignity of wearing silky, black horsehair fresh from the Korean pastures with the sophistication of Western top hats, and you get this brimful of Eastern elegance.

 

History.

Going back in time around 3000 BC the first official records of hats appear, but 3250 BC ago a Bronze Age man’s body with his bearskin cap was found in a mountain in Europe. Jumping forward about 100 years ago, a Frenchman named Charles Varat wrote this about visiting the Kingdom of Joseon, Korea’s forebear: that the nation seemed to him to be a kingdom of hats, and that even excluding the gat, there were so many of a variety of hats for women, men and children for assorted uses, revealing their identity, manners, courtesy etc.

 

Just before Japanese colonization of Korea, in fact around the turn of the century from 19th to 20th century, a lot of photographs taken depict a multitude of people of Joseon wearing their gat and white clothes. You can’t but wonder agape at the popularity of gat in these pictures of raw Korea before the colonization. The black gat, Heukrip, has been a beautiful universal favourite for a long time and was put on by all the various classes of male Joseonites. Because as a boy, you don’t cut away the hair your parents gave you when you were born.

 

Up to a whopping 43 traditional hats are featured in wikipedia “hats” entry along with minuscule pics of them. Few of them are as graceful as the gats. The external colours of gats are black but have originally varied. They are also ancient, dating back to pre-Joseon period in the Korean peninsula.

 

Traditionally the gat went through changes throughout the Joseon period. In the Japanese occupation the gat was both phased out and found out by the police in around 1895, but in the 1980s you could still spot a random old country man wearing his gat in express bus terminals in Seoul.

 

Making.

With a colourful history of a dainty range of silky-black horsehair on a disc-shaped brim, yangtae, and an inner cylindrical moja in thin bamboo threads for male adults and in streets and sarangbang (a sort of men’s reception room) gat has been spectacular. On the upside the pitch-dark horsehair, on the downside the thinned bamboo thread, the horsehair covers the bamboo part which faces the underside. Good quality bamboo was finely split, made into thin threads to create the shapes of both moja and yangtae.

 

The aforementioned Charles Varat ‘discovered’ the gats and described its making process in some detail participated by the manufacturer, the merchant, the dyer etc.

 

Traditionally, the gat kept changing shapes maintaining diverse proportions in its brim and head part, moja, and was ever looking for Korean versions of harmony. The bound hair had on topknot and over the topknot also sometimes was mang-geon, a horsehair-woven headband.

 

There are the moja covering the topknot, also yangtae (brim) to create shade, When these two elements come together you get a harmonious range of Joseon hats, utility-wise and socially.

 

Some say that the heukrip, the black gat, is the most elegant hat in the world. Haptic-wise, it has light feel, and the sun shines over it through the yangtae to fix a thin, beautiful shade on the wearer’s face.

 

Precious stones such as jade and agate were attached to the gat’s cord to bring more value to the wearer, fascinating even for Koreans.

 

The origins of horsehair: In times of the Kingdom of Goryeo, the horse hair comes from the horses reared in pastures on the rises in the whole of Korean peninsula.

 

Discourse.

Some say, hopefully, the recorded traditional sight of men wearing this black, steady historical hat over their tightly-bound long hair could itself continue to breed a not-just-belonging-to-past, intellectual, scholarly citizens’ culture of resistance to face false authority repeatedly manifest in the Korean peninsula. C’est possible! In Korea in Joseon period, the prominent ones were always scholars of confucian variety, looking to change the world.

 

Nowadays, the ceremonical gats are still used sometimes in rituals and traditional events. Featured so, culturally it could indicate a call for some kind of significant apparatus for reformation of that same society. Visitors to museums can take the hats out of the museum exhibits in their imagination and go on to contemplate solemnly about the gat’s aura as a scholarly treat. In Kingdom, a historical Netflix drama series, these very hats have managed to catch the eyes of viewers worldwide and is now floating away in the global culture as a visual element.

 

The gat’s dignity was and has been culturally upheld as a historical social regulation and, to be optimistic, will continue to be so.