UselessFinds
Napoleon's Hat, Worn Sideways Like He Did

worn point-forward is wrong

Absurd Costumes

Napoleon's Hat, Worn Sideways Like He Did

A black felt bicorne with a French tricolour cockade and gold trim. The specific hat one man made impossible to wear seriously.

Buy this nonsense$69.85$38.42(sponsored link, opens in a new tab)
  • napoleon hat
  • bicorne
  • historical costume
  • french
  • cosplay hat
  • party costume

What Is This Thing?

A bicorne — a two-cornered felt hat, folded flat front and back — in black, with a red-white-and-blue cockade pinned to one side and a gold cord along the brim. One variant adds gold trim around the whole edge.

Every naval and staff officer in Europe wore one of these for about eighty years. Exactly one of them wore it side-on rather than point-forward, and that decision is the reason you recognise the shape at all.

Why You Don't Need It

It is a hat for one specific costume, and that costume is a two-hundred-year-old French emperor. There is no second occasion.

It also does not fold, does not pack, and will arrive in a box considerably larger than the thing you ordered.

Why You'll Buy It Anyway

Because it is one of about four objects in the world that constitutes a complete costume on its own. A bicorne worn sideways, a hand in a jacket, and you are done — no other item required, no explanation required, recognisable across every country that has a school history syllabus.

Thirty-eight dollars for a costume you can assemble from a hat and an existing coat compares well against anything in a fancy dress shop.

Napoleon's Hat, Worn Sideways Like He Did — photograph 2
Napoleon's Hat, Worn Sideways Like He Did — photograph 3

Who It's Actually For

Fancy dress with a deadline, historical reenactment at the amateur end, and theatre or school productions where the hat has to read from the back of a hall.

It also has a small second life as a wall object. Mounted on a shelf a bicorne looks deliberate in a way most costume pieces do not.

before you click buy

Check the head size. Felt hats from this category run small and a bicorne perched on top of a head rather than sitting in it loses the whole silhouette.

Decide between the plain and the gold-trimmed version deliberately. The plain one is closer to the portraits; the gold-trimmed one photographs better under artificial light.

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