Gat, summarized

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

 

Going back in time around 3000 BC the first official records of hats are made, but  in 3250 BC already a Bronze Age man’s body with his bearskin cap was found in a mountain in Europe. Jumping to the late Joseon times in Korean peninsula, the black gat, Heukrip, had been a beautiful universal favourite for a long time and was put on by most of 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. Oh no, not now!

 

Up to a whopping 43 traditional hats are featured in wikipedia “hats” entry with minuscule pics of them. Few of them seem as graceful as the gats. Traditionally the gat went through brave changes throughout the Joseon period. In the Japanese occupation the gat was phased 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.

 

With a colourful history of a dainty range of silky-black horsehair on a disc-shaped brim, called 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 underside good quality bamboo was finely split, made into thin threads to create the shapes of both moja and yangtae.

 

Traditionally, the gat kept changing shapes maintaining diverse proportions in both its brim and head part, moja, and was forever looking for Korean versions of harmony. The hair was bound topknot. There are the moja covering the topknot hairdo, also yangtae to create shade, utility-wise and socially.

 

Some say that the heukrip, the black gat, is the most elegant hat. 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.

 

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.

 

Some say, hopefully, that the recorded traditional sight of men wearing this black, steady historical hat over their tightly-bound long hair could itself continue to breed an intellectual, scholarly and not-just-belonging-to-past 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 gat-wearing scholars of confucian variety, looking to change the world.

 

Nowadays, the ceremonial gats are used sometimes in rituals and traditional events. Visitors to museums can take out

the hats from the museum exhibits in their imagination and go on to contemplate solemnly about the gat’s aura as a scholarly treat.

 

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