The tricorn hat is one of the most visually distinctive hat silhouettes in history and one of the most precisely dated. The three upturned brim points that give the tricorn its name and its silhouette dominated European and North American hat wearing for almost exactly one century (roughly 1680-1780) and then disappeared almost completely within a decade, replaced by the taller cylindrical hats that followed. No other major hat style has had such a clearly bounded period of dominance -- the tricorn arrived, ruled, and departed within a historical window tight enough to use for fairly precise dating of paintings and illustrations.
What Makes a Tricorn
The tricorn (French: tricorne, 'three-cornered') is defined by a single construction choice: the brim of a hat is cocked (folded up) at three points to form three corners or peaks, creating the characteristic three-pointed profile. The crown underneath the cocked brim is a fairly standard low rounded or oval crown; what distinguishes the tricorn is entirely the brim treatment.
The three 'cocking' points are positioned:
- One point at the front of the hat
- Two points at the sides or rear
The specific angles and proportions of the three points varied by decade, region, country, and social class -- a military officer's tricorn in France looked different from a gentleman's tricorn in England, which looked different from a colonial American version. But all shared the fundamental three-point brim cocking.
Why Was the Brim Cocked?
The brim-cocking practice did not begin with the tricorn -- it predates it. In the 17th century, soldiers and hunters began turning up parts of their hat brims for practical reasons: to avoid the brim interfering with a musket or rifle when sighting along the barrel, or to allow more peripheral vision. A single-sided brim tuck created the bicorn; turning up three sides created the tricorn.
The practice spread from military utility to civilian fashion, as military dress so often does, and the three-point cocked brim became a fashionable civilian choice independent of any rifle-sighting function. The tricorn's fashion peak was the period when both military and civilian male dress had converged on the same hat form, which is why the hat appears in both battlefield paintings and society portraits of the same era.
The Period of Dominance: 1680-1780
The tricorn's century of dominance aligns almost precisely with the period of European high baroque and rococo culture -- the era of Louis XIV and XV in France, of Handel and Bach in music, of Wren and Hawksmoor in architecture, and of the elaborate formal dress that characterises those courts. The tricorn is the hat of this specific cultural moment in the same way the fedora is the hat of the 1920s-1950s.
Historical figures so completely associated with the tricorn that it is inseparable from their visual identity: Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte (whose bicorn is a variant of the tricorn tradition), Admiral Horatio Nelson, and the anonymous but immediately recognisable 'minute man' of American Revolutionary iconography.
The Decline: The 1780s
The tricorn's decline was rapid. By the 1780s and into the 1790s, the taller hat styles that would become the top hat had begun to displace the tricorn in fashionable European and American dress. The bicorn (two-cornered hat) was a transition point -- Napoleon's characteristic hat is a bicorn, not a tricorn, and his career places him at exactly the historical moment of the tricorn's replacement.
The shift from the tricorn's horizontal visual emphasis to the top hat's vertical emphasis tracks the broader aesthetic shift from baroque and rococo decoration to the simpler, more vertical lines of neoclassical style that followed the French Revolution. The hat's form followed the cultural moment, as it typically does.
The Tricorn After 1800
The tricorn survived its fashion peak in several contexts:
- Naval uniforms in Britain and several other countries retained tricorn-influenced hat forms in ceremonial dress well into the 19th century
- Pirate costume and theatre became major repositories of the tricorn silhouette, which has kept it visually familiar to the present day
- Historical reenactment, particularly Revolutionary War and Colonial American reenactment in the United States, maintains the tricorn as a standard element of period dress
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between a tricorn and a bicorn hat?
Both are cocked-brim hat styles. A tricorn has three cocked points (three sides of the brim turned up). A bicorn has two cocked points (two sides of the brim turned up), creating an elongated hat with peaks at the front and rear rather than at three points. Napoleon Bonaparte's characteristic hat is a bicorn; the American minute man's hat is a tricorn. The bicorn was the later fashion (emerging in the 1790s as the tricorn declined) and is associated with the Napoleonic era specifically, while the tricorn covers the longer period from approximately 1680-1790.
Did pirates really wear tricorn hats?
Some pirates in the 18th century did wear tricorn hats, as the tricorn was the standard male hat of that period -- it would have been odd if 18th century sailors and pirates were not wearing the dominant hat of their era. Whether tricorns were particularly associated with piracy (as opposed to just being what men were wearing) is a different question, and the specific pirate-and-tricorn visual association is largely a theatrical and literary construction from the 19th and 20th centuries that romanticised the 'golden age of piracy' period. Real pirates of the period wore whatever was available, which would have included tricorns along with many other hat styles.
Why do Revolutionary War soldiers wear tricorn hats?
Because the American Revolutionary War took place during the tricorn's period of dominance (1775-1783). The soldiers, officers, and civilians of the Revolutionary period wore the fashionable hat of their moment, which was the tricorn. This is simply the right hat for the period, not a deliberate choice to signal anything specific. The tricorn's association with the Revolution and the founding of the United States comes from this chronological alignment rather than from any special symbolic relationship between the hat and the political ideas of the era.