Talk:Stovepipe hat

On the nature of the hat

Sorry, but Troughton’s hat never was a “stovepipe”, and if it was called that in prose stories, it was simply misidentified.

It’s nothing to do with “some” fashion experts disagreeing, asthe article suggests, it’s that it’s wrong, plain and simple. It’s like saying that because his trousers were checked, Troughton was wearing a kilt, but just one with legs, and not tartan. It’s sort of right, but mostly entirely wrong.

To be a “stovepipe” the hat has to be both flat on top, and cylindrical, keeping the same diameter all the way up. A top hat has a smaller diameter at the bottom than at the top, flaring outwards from hatband to crown.

Troughton’s Doctor wears a “Paris Beau”, a hat which has a diminishing diameter from bottom to top, verging on the conical, with a rounded top, and a distinctive brim which curls up at the sides and down at the front and back. It’s from at least a generation before the stovepipe came to prominence, and was popular during the Regency period in England, and favoured by the “Aristos” of pre-Revolutionary France.– The preceding unsigned comment was added by 86.143.62.163 (talk • contribs) .

So how we do things on the wiki is that if something is labeled as 'x' in the DWU and there's no conflicting thing also labeled as 'x', the in-universe summary and the title for the page will treat this labeling as if it were correct. Strictly speaking, the behind the scenes section will do so as well, it will just note that things differ in the real world. So instead, we might have:

In the real world, some fashion experts might say that it's not actually a stovepipe, as it doesn't have a flat top.

instead of what we currently have. But we don't usually say that the DWU is wrong per se. (I've been corrected on this myself, so I understand the tendency to want to say this.) Najawin ☎ 09:51, July 18, 2020 (UTC)

This is all quite a confusing situation, but if the TV hat isn't a stovepipe hat, then what evidence do we have that "the Doctor's stovepipe hat" described in The Murder Game and Wonderland is the same hat? Couldn't it be that the Second Doctor's Paris Beau hat (identified as such through the same rule which allows us to say a blender is a blender) simply does not appear in those stories, which instead "mistakenly" posit that the Doctor owned a different, stovepipe hat?--Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 10:11, July 18, 2020 (UTC)