Ben Okri’s mission impossible: finding the perfect beret

Photograph by Cecile Burban

Berets tend to be made of wool. After a while the sweat of one’s brow and natural wear and tear reduces the once proud beret to a drooping image of itself. A sad-looking beret makes for a sad face. When a beret begins to add lugubriousness to your expression, it is time to take to the shops and find a new one. For me, it’s time to find the perfect beret.

Every object that one wears daily becomes imbued with the personality of the wearer. With time it acquires a talismanic power. That’s why the quest for a new beret amounts to a crisis. It means finding one that will accompany the next cycle of my life. Finding the right beret is as difficult as finding a true friend. They appear when you are ready. Every beret that I’ve worn a long time has always come to me in a magical way.

As no new beret appeared, I systematically set about finding one. I began with the internet and made two orders, but when they arrived they felt inert. Then I decided to visit hat makers renowned for making good English berets. My quest took me first to Laird Hatters on the Strand next to the Savoy. It’s a small shop crammed with summer hats, fedoras, and Peaky Blinder caps. It is essentially a one room affair. The man serving was tall and reserved.

“We are the proletariat of hat shops,” he said. “We do affordable hats for the people.”

There were a few tourists in the shop, trying on fedoras. All he had left were a few white and green and pink berets. He said the beret season was over by June, that people bought the black ones early in the year. As they were handmade, when they sold out that was it.

Then I walked across to St James’s Street, to Lock & Co, with my partner. The shop had been in continuous residence there since 1676. It’s a quaint shop with stacks of pillboxes everywhere and clientele trying on top hats. Men trying on hats always look a little sheepish. While I watched, one of the servers wearing a top hat himself came to attend to us. He led us past mirrors and mannequins to a room designed to make you feel the impressive history of the establishment. Documents on the walls informed you that Lock & Co had been sticking hats on the upper echelons of society for over 300 years. The serving man returned and showed me berets stashed in a high compartment, at the back of the shop. I tried on a few and had a small crisis myself. They sat on the head like misshapen pies. After trying on everything they had I told the gentleman that I’ll be taking my quest to Paris.

“The berets in Paris sit even higher on the head. They are ginormous. You’ll be back, you’ll see,” he said confidently. I went off into a sunny London day in which the perfect beret could not be found. But what makes a perfect beret? It’s the way it sits on the head. It should frame the face in a way that makes the wearer look most authentic. Ambiguity is the essence of the perfect beret.

“What if you make the trip to Paris, scour the whole city, and find that your old beret is the perfect one?” my partner asked me. She had a point. Berets are often at their best when they age. For a moment I had no answer to the possible futility of the quest. “Then that will be the story,” I said.

When Mirabella, my eight-year-old daughter, heard I was going to Paris she wanted to accompany me and help in my quest. So I booked tickets for the whole family. What began as a personal quest became a family adventure.

In Paris a taxi strike had been going on for three days. It had its origin in how little the state paid them for being unofficial ambulances. We ordered an Uber, but the driver was set upon as a strike-buster.

“I have two children to feed,” he shouted at them. “Strike for one, two days, yes, but indefinitely, no.”

He dropped us off at the Hôtel du Palais Royal, in the centre of Paris, close to the Louvre. The hotel is adorable. Emily in Paris, the hit television series, was filmed nearby. When we were shown to our room we found a mascot called Mona and a red beret on the main bed. Emily wore such a beret in the series that attracts a crowd of tourists to the courtyard. The manager had heard about my quest and had gifted this beret to my daughter. It proved a hit. People smiled at Mirabella when we were out.

It was a beautiful day in Paris. We walked along Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Rue Tiquetonne, to the hat shop called Antonio Peto. It was run by a slender lady with a high-pitched laugh. The shop sold cloche hats and beanies and a small selection of their own handmade berets, which were heavily discounted. I tried on a few Peto hats, but none were my size. I resisted Mirabella’s attempt to get herself a boater hat which cost €170.

A visit to a few other shops proved equally fruitless.

We went back to the hotel, had a delightful lunch, and made for the shop of the legendary beret-makers of Paris. With the taxi strike on, we decided to walk everywhere. We went through the courtyard of the Domaine National du Palais-Royal and walked the whole length of the Jardin Tuileries with its fine sandy dust till we got to the Place de la Concorde. At Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré we had trouble locating the shop, till someone directed us to a courtyard concealed by a door. We went through the door within the door. And there it was, like a mirage, a well-kept secret, deep in the quiet of a cobbled courtyard. A sign above the shop read: Laulhère. Le Béret Français Depuis 1840.

It was well lit inside. There were beret brushes on the wall and berets on golden mannequin heads that were like Brancusi sculptures. A woman called Iona was in charge of the shop. Her father, whom love had brought to Paris, was from Sheffield. The shop was colourful, elegant and minimalist. There’s a myth among London hatters that the French beret has too much volume. I tried one of Laulhère’s and it was not true. But it was a bit tight. Iona was not troubled by this. She took the beret to a machine in a corner and operated it as if it were a car jack. This beret-adjusting machine is typical of the French passion for incidental inventions. The expanded beret fitted me perfectly. This would normally take a few months. While I tried it on, I noticed my daughter looking cool in a black star-spangled beret. She had beaten me to the most iconic item they had in the shop. I wanted one too. It was love at first wear.

Then Iona told me the history of the beret. It all began in the Pyrenees and was first made in 1840 by the Laulhère brothers, who used to make socks. It occurred to them one day to make hats that protected peasants from the heat and the cold. That’s how an icon of the resistance and the intelligentsia was born. In the early days peasants stuffed salad leaves between the rim of the berets and their heads.

Then the military took it up, wearingit slanted to the right. Plein air late-19th-century artists needed it to protect them from sun and snow. It became a sign of solidarity with peasants. Twentieth-century revolutionaries wore it and jazz folk adopted it as a symbol of creativity. Black Panthers, in the 60s, sported it as an emblem of anti-racial militancy. As the ideologies of that decade were undermined, the beret fell from grace. It had borne too much symbolism. By the 80s it was a relic. When Ibegan wearing it a few friends thought I was being a throwback. I wasn’t. It was my mythology. Other people have expensive wristwatches, designer clothes, dark glasses, Ferraris, sardonic expressions, but I have a simple beret.

Wearing a beret now for three decades has taught me that how one sees oneself is the basis of one’s utopia, and that striving to be an agent of change is not a bad way of loving the world.

In the end we all found the berets we wanted and took pictures to commemorate the event. Then in the morning it was the journey home, on Eurostar, to a new cycle.

Madame Sosostris & the Festival for the Broken-Hearted by Ben Okri is published by Apollo (£14.99). Order a copy at observershop.co.uk