Karen Exner Hüte und andere Kopfbedeckungen aus aller Welt
[Hats and Other Headware From All Over the World]

— to the extraordinary picture book by illustrator Karen Exner about ‘Hats and other forms of headgear from all around the world’

Chapeau! Here’s a picture book for children about all manner of hats! Who in their right mind would ever dream of talking about the hats of yesteryear in this day and age when the kids in our latitudes sport baseball caps as the non plus ultra in sophisticated headgear, pull woolly hats over their ears or, if push comes to shove, slap a bike helmet on their head? Yesterday’s hats?!

Well, blow me down! In her book Hüte und andere Kopfbedeckungen aus aller Welt (‘Hats and other forms of headgear from all around the world’) the young illustrator Karen Exner makes use of a scrupulously consistent, clear and stringent verbal and graphic language to offer a unique insight into the world of headwear. She creates her colourful illustrations using oil pastels and a sgrafitto technique; she employs this time-consuming and sometimes meditative method, she says, because it affords her the space to really immerse herself in the topic. Given the book’s unique mode of design and its unusual theme, it is unsurprising that it gained her the 2023 Hamburg Picture Book Prize.

Right from the off the book’s ‘portrait’ rather than ‘landscape’ format makes it come across as out of the ordinary. The cover picture is striking with its shiny top-hat in black and green perched on a man’s head, only half of which is visible. This is such an inviting image that one could readily believe that on opening the book we might find the top-hatted character leaping out at us like a jack-in-the box and calling out ‘Hello!’ Our curiosity is thus instantly awakened. “Hats are super-exciting!  They have been worn for a variety of reasons since time immemorial. The oldest-known representation of a hat was discovered in France. It dated from the palaeolithic era and was created more than 21,000 years ago. It depicts a head carved out of a mammoth’s tusk and wearing a hood. Could you ever have imagined such a thing?”

No, probably not. But the more you think about it, the more your head fills with images of hats you have either heard of or have already actually come across. And not just baseball caps and woolly hats, but others such as astronauts’ and divers’ helmets, berets, beekeepers’ hats, kippahs, policemen’s caps, sombreros, cowboy hats, hijabs, laurel wreaths, bridal veils, headscarves, soldiers’ helmets, fezzes, bearskin shakos or ‘busbies’, party hats, crowns and bobble hats. The book presents altogether sixty different and characterful forms of headgear, and at the end even reprises them in an alphabetical list. And to top it all off there’s a riddle right at the close: has anyone clocked the twelve forms of headgear that are depicted in the book from above? And talking of bobble hats: did anyone already know beforehand that the pompom on bobble hats was originally designed as a ‘shock-absorber’ to protect seamen’s heads? For the ceilings below deck were so low that the crew could easily bang their heads.

On every page of the book an example of each sort of headdress is featured as part of a head-and-shoulders portrait, and its origin and function are explained in a brief and readily comprehensible description. The design approach is consistent throughout, in that everything is reduced to its bare essentials. The portraits resemble cartoon woodcuts; the skin of the figures is depicted in a vast variety of different textures and patterns. In some cases there are accompanying illustrations that supplement the verbal information about the headgear in question – an image of a cyclist falling off his bike, for instance; a view of a hatter’s workshop; a deep-sea diver at the bottom of the sea; the spectators at an English horse race. It’s all done with such wit! And where wit might be out of place, the descriptions of everything from A to Z (from ‘Aluhut’ – ‘tin-foil hat’ – to ‘Zylinder’ – ‘top hat’) are rendered effective by the engaging tone of the narrative voice.

It is the unique combination of style, information and pictorial mode that renders this book so delightful to look at and to read. And the contrasting of types of headgear from vastly different cultures causes us to marvel at the sheer variety of fashions and traditions, and at the fact that, regardless of the culture in question, hats are invariably worn on top of people’s heads, whether it’s Vietnamese rice farmers, the English Queen, a French devotee of the bohemian lifestyle, a German carnival clown or an Australian aborigine.