For my entire life, until 5 years ago, pith helmets were just colonial helmets to me. At least, until I needed one to round off a fetching steampunk outfit for a Comic-Con. Afterall, a pith helmet remains the purest evocation. Adventure. Exploration. Discovery. Just stick one of them on any character, and channel Allan Quatermain, Howard Carter, Stanley and Livingstone. Jumanji. Add a goatee to your character, and you evoke the Empire. Exploration and exploitation, the two sides of the same coin. So why did pith helmets disappear?
Where once everyone in the tropics wore, or wanted to wear a pith helmet, only photos and a silhouette remain today.
If you are English, you would call it a topee, a safari helmet or a pith helmet. If you are French, you know it as a colonial helmet, a casque colonial. In German or Dutch, it is just a tropical helmet: Tropenhelm. And so, as often, you have the full pallet of interpretations just by comparing semantics. Only the French version does not skirt the direct association of the hat with the Empire. The British make it more of a hobby hat and the German version is a functional one. All of these things are true, not individually, but as a whole.
The pith helmet has a definite tropical function, but is also associated with a certain lifestyle, society and status.
Practically speaking, the pith helmet is a hat made of cork wood, rattan, wrapped in cloth. It sometimes uses pith. Basically, you need a frame of vegetal fibres, a high dome ventilated either by side-holes or a top-vent.
The pith helmet is your tropical portable air-con: dip the pith helmet in water, then, wear it soaked. The slow evaporation cools off your skull, thus preventing sun- and heat strokes. Truth be told, I just found this out in many internet articles, although I never heard about that practise direction from anyone. Always trust the hivemind then.
Regardless of how, pith helmets were recommended to all European personnel, like malaria pills.
The original design is Filipino, adopted by the Spanish for their colonial troops, improved by the French with the same purpose, until finally the British copied it. And like that, it went viral, becoming a universal emblem of faraway places.
If it started off as a protection against the sun, it soon meant something more entirely. But, before we go into the political symbol, we have to stop and look at the pith helmet as a social signal. Check out the pictures.
Picnic with the family? Pith helmet – healthy practice.
Church? Pith helmet.
Sunday’s best? Pith helmet.
You get the idea. Everyone seemed to wear one, from the factory hand, the sapeur(*), the colonial administrator to the club member.
In the earlier pictures, at beginning of 20th century, everyone is still wearing traditional headdresses: the Africans their tribal traditional headgear and the Europeans their traditional bowler hats, trilby and top hats. After that, the pith helmet spread across societies as a social signifier. A uniform of sorts, a social marker certainly – a bit like the baseball cap today.
The symbol though always had a military connection. The pith helmet very colors, khaki or white, are deeply steeped in military history, as khaki proved more practical a solution than dipping your helmet’s white fabric in mud to make it less conspicuous. And today, why would so many iterations of Cluedo give a colonial helmet to Colonel Mustard if the shorthand was not obvious. Even the official name made it abundantly clear: Colonial Pattern Pith Helmet, Kitchener or Wolseley pattern, i.e. imperial pattern.
And so, as independences were won, given, taken, or fought over, the pith helmet lost all romanticism to become a pure symbol of oppression. George Orwell put the final nail in the coffin by deriding it as a mere superstition. Even when Adventure is back in Indiana Jones, Harrison Ford wears a Fedora. His prototype wore a pith helmet, but it was ditched by the studios. Too type-casted.
Pith helmet. Dead.
And so, as I just did, we can easily look back with 20/20 hindsight and righteous judgment at the history of the pith colonial helmets. But, soon enough, only the idea remains. And today, if you need a universal visual of Adventure: stick a pith helmet on it. Again, just check out Jumanji, whether the Robin Williams, Kevin Hart or Dwayne Johnson versions.
Pith helmets are a universal memory of a shared narrative that transcends factual History.
Some silhouettes just linger on, defying death, history and obsolescence, as they only retain their deepest meaning.
These helmets are Adventure, first and foremost. For a long time still.
(*) A Sapeur is a Western African, typically Congolese, dandy, priding her/himself in the way she/he dresses in radical fashion (Fr: se saper), often with a zazou/zoot suit vibe. Predating independence, it is a statement of African identity, visually reclaiming and appropriating the colonists’ clothes. The movement stays strong, and showcases radical African fashion.
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