Gentlemen,
After a hard days hunting in the Bush veld, your Pit helmet has done its job and protected you from the Sun and heat. Your CZ 550 in .505 Gibbs (ot whatever) has tackled the biggest tuskers...

Now, youre longing for the Sundowner. But how shall one dress on the "after-hunt" entertainment?

My suggestion:
Smoking jacket and Fez!

If you are a CZ fan you should of course use a Czech Fez.

Have a look at the "Best Quality" Fezes around:

http://www.tonak.cz/ang/tonak.html

Husky

Husky, I think your on to something here. We should all have a pith helmut, a fez and a beret. And not just any old hat, they should all be top quality, original design and fabrication. I didn't know the Czech's made fezzes (is that the plural of fez?) but I think I'll get one.

Hi wink,
I seriously think that the Gentleman with a Fez on his head gives him a much more distinguéd apperance and is very easy to separate from the ordinary wage earner with that crude looking baseball cap

P.S Maybe there are a market for the "AR" Fez. It would help us at the Safari Camp to separate the ordinary hunter from The Club members D.S

Husky

Here's my fez


I usually wear it with a white dinner jacket. But a smoking jacket may be OK in more informal camps.

Regards,

Terry

Terry,

Although your leopard skin Fez in nice, I'm a more traditional type:



Notice the hight, so that there is room for the heat to rise after warming up with a few stiff drinks.

T. Carr and Erik,
After seeing your Fezes -i realize that I have for serveral years missed something that I really din't understand that i missed!

T.Carr-i would consider yours to be "Very American" -but with the taste of the African soul!

Erik, Your would fit Mr Kemal Atatürk (founder of the modern Turky) very nicely!

I forgot to mention the Importance of using the right shoes to the Fez and the Smoking-Jacket.

I consider that a pair of monogrammed velvet slippers are the ideal foot wear. As monogrammed they are almost impossible to get mixed up with your hunting friends slippers.

After some Sundowners things can become rather complicated and confusing in the Camp. Hopefully some jolly good fellow in the Staff can help you reading the initials on the slippers.

Husky

Husky,

For casual daywear, when it's hot, a suitable option would be for example the "Shesh" worn in northern africa:


You might risk getting your riflestock entwined when shouldering your gun though. But then as fashion slaves, those are the risks we must take!

quote:

Husky: Have a look at the "Best Quality" Fezes around:
http://www.tonak.cz/ang/tonak.html

That is one fine hat website.

fla 3006,
Yes, Tonak makes very fine hats and the reason for that they are still around -we have to thank Komrade Lenin who launched the Communist system to Europe!

Tonak survived the because of that where no fashion within the Communist block.

When the fashion changed in the free world -the word fashion did not excist in the communist Europe. Therefore Tonak could keep on producing hats to the citizens of Sovjetunion, east Germany etc...

Today Tonak is one of the few hat making companies and i belive that they are hard to beat in the Fez niche

I will make a visit to Tonak later on this year -I like odd places and companies

Erik D
I agree 100% with you!
I think the "Shesh" right place is while hunting Gemsbock in Namibia or as the Gentleman prefers... Two legged game at Waikiki Beach

Husky

I'm afraid I'd blow my cowboy cool with a Fez

Amen brother! Resistol is my Fez!

Ha, ha!

JW

T. Carr,

Well, we know from another thread that your chosen fez pattern will keep the PHs interested in you!

All,

For anyone wanting a basic fez from Cairo, they can be had for next to nothing here. Cover shipping for me plus a buck or two for the fez and I will happily ship you all you want when I am back in the US this summer. I was actually on the Lock Hatters site recently and they were selling what looked to be the same fez available here for about 50-60 times the going rate in Cairo.

Best,

JohnTheGreek

Hmmmn . . . chaps, 'can't help but notice that yer forgettin' an essential part of yer outfit there. What point is there in havin' a fine fez and smokin' jacket without proper smokin' equipment. Yer might be able t'manage a good briar in yer "Out of Africa" broadbrim or a decent calabash under yer pith helmet, but that fez is goin' t'require a hookah, don'tcherknow. Shouldn't be too hard t'transport for those hardy types who go shootin' with a mahagony bar and crystal for the Scotch, what?

Bloody Right, Sarge

The Hippopotami all wear Fezzi

Elmo

Amen Sarge!

Husky

I have a fez from Senegal that´s full of emboideries, pieces of rhinestone and small mirrors. The kids hate it when I wear it so it must look good on me!

cewe,
Unfortunantely your experience tells us that good taste isn't necessary inherited from father to son (or daughter for that matter...)

My kids always finds the sitauation extra ordinary when their master uses his monocle in order to read the menue at Bentleys, 11-15 Swallow Street!

Husky

Fezes' and tassels, kind of reminds me of the first wife

"I have a fez from Senegal that´s full of emboideries, pieces of rhinestone and small mirrors. The kids hate it when I wear it so it must look good on me!"

"Unfortunantely your experience tells us that good taste isn't necessary inherited from father to son (or daughter for that matter...)"

"My kids always finds the sitauation extra ordinary when their master uses his monocle in order to read the menue at Bentleys, 11-15 Swallow Street!"

I say, if yer can't embarrass yer children when out in public, what good 'r' they? Given all the money yer put out f'r'em, the least they can do is give yer a little amusement in return. Hmmpf!

More about fezzes than you ever wanted to know.

http://www.historyhouse.com/in_history/fez_1/

Kamal Ataturk, the beneficent[1] dictator of Turkey in the 1920s, had himself a problem. The country of the Turks is placed smack between Europe and the near East, and is plagued by the ideological bifurcation such a location might suggest. Ataturk himself managed to create the Republic of Turkey in 1923 from the waning vestiges of the Ottoman empire, and he wanted this newfound country to follow in Europe's footsteps. He tossed the local Islamic leadership out on its collective ear in 1924, introduced the Western calendar and twenty-four hour clock in 1925 while simultaneously banning polygamy. The Latin alphabet showed up in 1928, Constantinople became Istanbul in 1930, and women were given suffrage in 1934. After a prodigious baby boom, last names were thrust upon the populace in 1935 (until then, you had a bunch of Ahmet-son-of-Mohammeds running about). But these are all trivial changes compared to the calamitous decree on August 30, 1925: Ataturk banned the fez as a piece of headgear.

Turban-ulent Times

The fez had been introduced in 1826 by Mahmud II to replace the turban. Mahmud, then head of the Ottoman Empire that was to be divvied up among various European nations and partially grow into Turkey, was raised by a Creole mother. He had the same sort of longing for Europe as Ataturk did, he'd already flirted with the Colonial-style three-cornered hat. His advisors duly noted that the three-cornered hat was supposed to reflect the Holy Trinity, at which point Mahmud wisely, if regretfully, dismissed the possibility of the hat gracing the closets and heads of his Islamic countrymen.

Soon afterward, though, a shipment arrived from Tunis of venerable fezzes. As Jeremy Seal, author of A Fez of the Heart: Travels round Turkey in Search of a Hat, remarks, "...if these fezzes were not perhaps as Western as he had hoped, they at least would provide him with a clean break from the burdensome turban." It wouldn't do not to wear a hat, yet, when it came time to pray, the hat could not be knocked off when the worshiper bent his head to the ground. Hence, brimlesshats were eminently practical from the standpoint of prayer, if useless in keeping the sun out of one's eyes. In a land beset with tradition, the transition from turban to fez did not go easy. In the mid-1830s, traveler Thomas Allom noted "the inhabitants still refuse to regulate their costume by direction of the Sultan; they refuse to doff the cherished turban... for the recently introduced fez." Western journalists unleashed a litany of disparaging comments. A Reverend Walsh intoned
A miserable substitute for the splendid turban.

Sir Adolphus Slade, similarly lauded the lost headwrap:
The magical effects of a turban are well known. It gives depth to light eyes, expression to dark eyes; it softens harsh features, relieves delicate ones.

And Julia Pardo, writing in 1834, was downright impolite:
I cannot forbear to record my regret as I beheld in every direction the hideous and unmeaning fez. The costly turban, that bound the brow like a diadem, and relieved by the richness of its tints the dark hue of the other garments, has now almost entirely disappeared from the streets.

Deal

They got used to it. In 1903, the Turkish writer Halil Halid remarked, "I was seized with the ambition of appearing up to date, and of dressing in the more modern manner; that is to say, European costume in all but the fez." In 1913, the Ottomans, wary of the impending World War, collected lira on the streets of the cities with which to buy two battleships from the British. However, Churchill, leery of Ottoman coziness with Austria and Germany, reneged. Germany, quick to capitalize on this supercilious stiffing, sent two warships of her own, and as they pulled into port at the slighted country, the Ottomans looked through their spyglasses and noticed complete German crews decked out in fezzes. They cheered. The Germans cheered. It was an utterly charming scene. The Ottomans joined the war on the German side soon afterward, thanks to a gentle stroking of the public's nationalistic fervor. In a short century, the fez had gone from being a nuisance to a badge of national identity. In 1919-1922 Smyrna was occupied by the Greeks, and fezwearers unwilling to go bareheaded got in trouble:
[Turks], both men and women, have been mishandled, insulted, or threatened in the streets of the town, the fezzes of the former and the veils of the latter being torn off their heads and trodden on.

Similarly, a British traveler named Marmaduke Pickthall started carrying a clandestine fez after being stoned by some Ottomans: "My only crime," he wrote, "had been to wear an ugly English hat."

Ministry of Foreign A Fez

Just about the time fezzes were really coming into their own, a young, befezzed Ataturk serving his country as an overseas delegate was insulted by a French officer: "Why do you wear that ridiculous thing?" The West had seemed teasingly close to Ataturk, who studied French under Dominican monks and "spent much time in reading revolutionary literature by French authors." As he grew to assemble the Turkish nation, he was unwilling to let a hat stand in his way. He outlawed the fez, and soon after, he wrestled a ruling from an Islamic judge that okayed Western garb:
If a Muslim buys a cow from a Christian, and the cow refuses to give milk unless the Muslim milks her while wearing a Christian hat, then the Muslim may wear such a hat.

Thus, the religious powers-that-be mercifully approved Turkey's Westernization with crystal clarity. To gather support for this Westernization, Ataturk did the unthinkable: he picked the most backward Turkish town imaginable, Kastamonu, and there performed the equivalent of a runway fashion show. For all the above mentioned anecdotes, he had some reason for concern. His biographer noted how quiet he was on the journey to this backwater. As Seal remarks, "Donning a Western hat in Kastamonu wasn't just inappropriate. It was like wearing furs to the zoo or pink to a funeral; it was inexcusable and outrageous."

Be that as it may, Ataturk pulled no punches. Upon witnessing a man toting the traditional badge of honor after having gone on a pilgrimage to the Mecca, he said
I see a man in front of me wearing a fez on his head and a green turban wrapped round the fez... would a civilized man put on this preposterous garb and go out to hold himself up to universal ridicule?

The people of Kastamonu, and, indeed, the rest of Turkey were flabbergasted. Ataturk walked every parade route in town, some of them twice, in tweed suits and bowlers. Fezzes were now illegal, and a whole country had to scramble to find itself something to wear atop its head. Western hats were exported to Turkey in untold numbers. Seal details:
They came by ship and by train, bowlers and homburgs, panamas and flatcaps, but they did not come in sufficient numbers to meet the demand. In Ankara, the hat stores were continually sold out. In Constantinople, even the countless new shops that sprang overnight could not keep pace. Such was the shortage that the prefect of the city... set restrictions on the profit that could be made legally on hats.

Imagine That With a Hat

These new hats arrived with no instructions. Without experience, yet determined to have the proper angle just so, Turks devoured "How to Wear Such-and-such a Hat" articles either on streetcorners, or, if illiterate, harangued the educated into reading them aloud. Always quick to make a buck, the Europeans sent them, well, old hats: ridiculous things from a few seasons ago that had been mildewing in warehouses. Given that they were made in the early 1920s, one can only imagine. A London Times correspondent in Constantinople reported hats made of
Materials more appropriate for a Christmas cracker or a seaside comedian.... Duty before Dignity, as the bosun said; Progress before Dignity, says Turkey.

In 1928, journalist Harry A. Franck wrote
To one coming from still colorful Syria and the lands south of it, the arrival in a defezzed Turkey was almost painful... the crowd was as drab as a bunch of Italian subway muckers... the average gathering of Turkish men suggests a tramp convention.

Seal himself notes that
These travelers did not seem to regard the prohibition of turbans and fezzes as a moral issue and made no suggestion that personal preference rather than the law should dictate one's dress. Rather, the tone of their observations was aesthetic outrage, as if the Turks served merely to bring color and decoration to the landscapes through which these travelers passed. It was hard to imagine that the Turks shared their view.

And so early Turkey struggled with personal identity. As innumerable, shoddy European hats came ashore and men were arrested for not wearing them it became apparent that this affront to Turkish dignity at the hands of the country's greatest savior could to last. Next time: martial law declared on contraband fez-wearers, and a city named Fez that no longer has any.

Last time, we examined Turkey's early stumblings into modern European dress. Despite a stalwart population loyal to its culture, Turkey's great founder, Kamal Ataturk, decided that the future of civilization lay with Europe rather than the Near East. It seemed only natural to him that Turks should emulate Europeans in matters of decorum, and it was this point of view that led to the banishment of that revered, conical, red hat -- the fez -- from Turkey in 1925. Ataturk embarked on a journey to the darkest recesses of Turkey, to the conservative backwater town of Kastamonu, to plead his case. As Jeremy Seal notes in A Fez of the Heart: Travels Around Turkey in Search of a Hat, Ataturk picked the perfect spot. If he could convince the Kastamonu locals that bowlers and fedoras were the way, he could point to them as an example ("Even those rubes in Kastamonu are wearing them!"). Should he fail, he might subject them to public ridicule, and thereby save face: ("Those rubes in Kastamonu! Wearing fezzes! Imagine!"). He made his proper proclamations in town, strolled about in a dozen fancy outfits to the befuddlement of locals, and left town amid a swirl of confusion that has yet to right itself. From Seal, as are all quotes, unless otherwise noted:
On that day in Kastamonu, jaws gaped open that have not closed since. For the fez was the national hat and here was their leader brazenly decked out in the reviled uniform of the infidel.

Delighted at his perceived success in this dubious introduction, Ataturk journeyed to the nearby city of Inebolu. Inebolu had given Ataturk the lives of its sons in the Republic of Turkey's nascence. It had proved an invaluable military port during the nation's birth; Greece had tried to annex portions of the former Ottoman Empire in 1919 and Inebolu's residents fought this attempt heartily under Ataturk's steady hand. They loved him, and they loved him more on his return visit. They showered him with flowers and parades, and old men there still talk of his visit nearly seventy-five years ago. Children sang him praises and crowds kissed his hand. He wandered about town, and the people followed him in supplication. After gazing across the horizon over the Black Sea, he turned to the teeming townfolk and began to speak.
"The people of the Turkish republic, who claim to be civilized," he told them, "must prove that they are civilized by the way they appear." And that, he explained, meant boots and shoes, trousers, shirt, and tie, jacket and vest. "And to complete these, a cover with a brim on our heads. I want to make this clear. This head covering is called a hat."

Seal goes on to describe a photograph that captured the scene:
[Ataturk] is walking an Inebolu street among a throng of people. He is wearing a linen suit and a panama. He is also wearing a victorious smile, as if he knows he is among friends loyal to the point of excusing his extraordinary clothes. But he has just passed two local soldiers... in the photograph, they remain at attention, but the Gazi [Ataturk] has passed them, and behind his back their eyes at least are at ease to express astonishment. For the moment of the photograph, the soldiers are wide-eyed witnesses to a radically transformed world.[1]

The day Ataturk left Inebolu, September 2, Turkish civil servants were ordered to wear hats with brims and doff them when saluting. By November 25, all those found with fezzes were treated to three months' imprisonment. Fifteen year sentences for "anti-hat propaganda" were not unheard of. The West had arrived.

It Wasn't Just About Men's Fashion

There are fifty gaming houses in Inebolu, with its adult male population of roughly three thousand. As the males gamble, drink tea, and smoke cigarettes, the women work the sewing machines and bring livelihood to this town of little employment. This mildly chauvinistic reality is contrasted by early attempts to bring about equality by way of fashion. In the fall of 1925, the governor of the province outlawed veils, too:
"The veil," it [was] announced, "deprives women of the possibility of earning their livelihood, the custom is well known to be unsanitary, and it tends to hinder the work of the police by enabling criminals to conceal their identity. After ten days any women wearing a veil will be arrested."

This came on the heels of an edict in 1925 that beards were unacceptable, despite the former caliph having been censured for not having one a scant three years prior. Add this to many women's unwillingness to discard their veils and the fez flap and the police had a rather nightmarish enforcement problem. By 1935, women had been discarding veils on their own, but by 1968 some more reactionary female university students began to demand their return, or at least the right to wear one. The ban was relinquished in 1988, and reinstated in 1989 to the dismay of angry crowds. "Break the hands that remove head scarves," they chanted; they invoked Salman Rushdie's name in rage. The decision to allow veils was left to individual universities in 1990, but a professor named Muammar Askoy began to write legislation to overturn this decision. He was assassinated by an "unknown group calling itself Islamic Revenge". Seal notes, "Headgear in Turkey had claimed another life."

Things Get a Little Serious

By November of 1925, mere weeks after the ban, the London Times waxed rhapsodic, painting portraits of "the friends of the old order wearing the fez as a nightcap, taking it reverently out of a secret drawer, and dropping upon it tears of forbidden affection." The New York Times flubbed and referred to the "long gold embroidered robes and bright green fez" worn by Turkish emissaries, and after receiving some nasty letters from the Turkish government, had to rescind with, "Turkish Formal Dress does not comprise a fez".[2]

Crowds took to the streets in several metropolitan centers (Sivas, Erzurum, Maras, and Trabzon). They hung insulting posters, threatened local officials, and railed against, as Seal puts it, "iniquitous hat laws." Fortunately for the governmental powers, a state of emergency had been previously declared in the region to deal with Kurdish upstarts.[3] These soldiers could now fix the fez problem, having legally been brought there by a Kurdish threat that never materialized:
Since the extraordinary powers that [a state of emergency] implied had not been revoked, [the soldiers] could now quite constitutionally be deployed against fez wearers. The military tribunals that had recently dealt with armed, often fanatical Kurdish rebels were now directed to deal equally ruthlessly with people wearing the wrong kinds of hats. The navy dispatched a warship to move east along the Black Sea coast.

Nineteen people from various towns were swiftly executed for inciting riots and wearing fezzes. Hundreds were sentenced to years of labor (one hundred fourteen malefactors in Erzurum alone). Three years later, mass fez arrests were still fairly common in the countryside.

In 1930 the anti-fez forces thought they turned a corner when they confiscated over a hundred crates of clandestine fezzes outside of the city of Bursa; a haul large enough to befez the greater majority of the city's population. It was considered a major coup, although it also illuminated the sheer magnitude of the surreptitious fez trade. What untold warehouses crammed full of furtive hatwear might lay beyond Bursa were hinted at by this raid. The authorities promptly made fez smuggling a capital offense.

An Abortive Attempt at Restoration

Two months later, a pro-fez riot broke out in the burg of Omelette, at the behest of one Mehmet. He had originally intended to take Omelette and the nearby towns of Manisa and Balikesir, and from there gain momentum, overthrow the Kamal regime, and restore the fez to its deserved glory. Mehmet had followers stationed in all three towns, and, on the appointed day, the three bands locked themselves into rooms with dates and water. They planned to eat forty dates the first day, and one less date each following day, until the fortieth day, upon which the frenzied, hungry group would unleash itself upon the unwitting authorities. (Seal calls this "an advanced course in outrage designed to ready them for insurrection.") Unfortunately, locking oneself in a room with a barrel of dates is bound to cause some unintended effects, and hapless Mehmet lost track of time and came out a little early. His confederates in Manisa and Balikesir were still locked up, but, undeterred, Mehmet and his limited coterie swept through town. Nine residents were killed, not to mention a young soldier who had his head hacked off and paraded about.

Martial law was immediately declared in the area, two hundred conspirators tried, and twenty-eight put to death. A youngster named Ismail Hussein, in an inspired moment, pretended to have his hands bound behind him and, as he was about to be hung, leapt from the gallows into the crowd. He fled to the mountains, and was in the process of becoming a legendary outlaw when he arrived, starving and dying from exposure, in a small village. The villagers promptly turned him over to the authorities for the advertised 1000 lira reward, and he was swiftly hung. We here at History House give a nod to the villagers' eminent practicality; however, it was perhaps their last great chance at restoring their beloved hat. In 1947, more than twenty years after the original edict, some 600 Turks were arrested for fez-wearing. Old habits die hard.

Footnotes
We are, unfortunately, not in possession of this picture. It is in a museum in Inebolu.
Seal takes this opportunity to describe further confusion amongst identifying characteristics of the Persians, Egyptians and Turks. He also extensively delineates the differences between fezzes, kullahs, and tarbooshes. A tarboosh mildly resembles a fez, and when an Egyptian minister wore one to one of Ataturk's diplomatic receptions, the man received a stern note proclaiming, "Tell your king I do not like his uniform." The minister left in a huff. Tarbooshes originated in the city of Fez, which no longer makes either hat, much to Seal's consternation.
This is an age-old problem of the region. Witness the recent furor over Kurdish terrorist and sometime leader Ocalan.

Bibliography
Jeremy Seal. A Fez of the Heart: Travels Around Turkey in Search of a Hat. Harcourt Brace & Company, 1995.
Donald Everett Webster. The Turkey of Ataturk. George Banta Publishing Company, 1939.

Duckear,

Thank you for the Important information concerning the No 1 headdress at the Camps "After Hunt" entertainment

For the non hunter or for that matter, for The Hunters off season occupation i can strongly recommend a membership in the Sheridan Club

Follow this link to a new world!
http://www.thechapmagazine.com/


Husky

If I Have to choose one fez, this is mine choice



The bersagliere's fez

Husky,
Even if I sometimes hunt in Småland with various friends, I was under the impression that Småland at large was "The Kentucky of Sweden". Your posts have made med wonder if there isn't some culture amongst the firs all the same.

Regards,
Martin

Marterius,
Please accept my humble mark of gratitude!

Well, I consider Småland to be the cradle of Culture as far as i know Culture

By the way, I have lived in Stockolm for 19 years now.

Husky

Husky,
Where culture has its cradle is one thing, where it matures is another!

I hope to see you on the Scandinavian AR meeting here in May - cchunter will eventually post an invitation here.

Regards,
Martin

The evil and sinister characters in the vintage classic movies always used to wear fezes.

Except in "Khartoum" which I watched a while ago where Charlton Heston as Gordon also wears a fez.

Maybe the start of a whole new fashion (in the looney bin!)

quote:

Originally posted by NitroX:
Maybe the start of a whole new fashion (in the looney bin!)

NitroX
Always remember: "The one who dares (to wear a Fez) wins!"

husky