One spring day when I was in my early 20s, I decided that I needed to get a hat. I asked a female coworker — someone I knew to have good taste in clothing — what sort of hat she thought would look good on me.

“Mark,” she said with great sincerity, “you don’t have enough style to wear a hat.”

I can’t pretend that her remark didn’t hurt, but I suppose she was right. I’ve never been known for my fashion sense. Not only have I dressed the same way for my entire adult life — khakis or jeans, a button-down shirt, and a cotton sweater — but I hardly ever notice what other people are wearing (unless they happen to look exceptionally good or exceptionally bad). When I saw a headline the other day that said something like, “High-waisted jeans are out; low-rise jeans are coming back,” what I took away was that there apparently are different flavors of jeans. (I’d always thought jeans were just jeans.)

What struck me about the hat comment, though, was that the style of wearing a hat was evidently more important than the usefulness of the hat. Of course, appearance does matter — if I’m going to wear a hat, I want it to be one that looks good on me — but that consideration is secondary. It seems obvious that the primary consideration should be that the hat will do what I need it to do (which, in this case, was to protect me from the sun).

What feels obvious to me, however, appears not to be as obvious to everyone else. People who wear hats indoors (a behavior that I’ve found inexplicably common among jazz musicians), or people who turn their baseball caps around so that the sunshade is in the back, seem not to be particularly concerned about the purpose of a hat. Then there are the many people (mostly women, but some men as well — think Frank Sinatra) for whom being stylish requires wearing a hat on an angle. Take Lauren Bacall, in the 1940s photo at the top of this post, whose severely tilted beret leaves half of her head exposed to the elements for no good reason.

For an even more extreme example, consider this portrait of the entertainer Josephine Baker, taken in the 1930s (above, to the right of Lauren). The thing she’s wearing on her head does nothing to shield her from sun or rain, or to keep her warm, or to stop her hair from getting mussed (in fact, she probably had to use a dozen hairpins to make it stay on her hair at all). And yet, for lack of a more descriptive word, I suppose we’d still have to call it a “hat.”

Again, I have nothing against fashion. We humans have a hunger for novelty, and continually changing styles help to satisfy that hunger. What baffles me, though, is style at the expense of practicality.

There’s probably no better example of that tendency than women (it is almost entirely women) who have long, painted fingernails. If you know me, you know that I have trouble with the idea of painting body parts in general — I think it looks silly. But since a reliable source (OK, Wikipedia) tells me that women have been painting their nails since 3,000 BC, I have to accept that mine is a minority opinion, and that most people find colored nails to be genuinely attractive. That’s fine; putting pigment on one’s nails doesn’t hurt anybody.

Why, though, do nails have to be long? I’m always mystified about why so many women make everyday tasks — typing, buttoning, opening a can of soda, playing a stringed instrument — more difficult for themselves, when nobody is forcing them to do so. Not only do long nails make fingers less able to do the things that fingers are supposed to do; it also makes the nails themselves less able to do the things that they are supposed to do. When my goddaughter once asked me for help in opening a sealed package, I said, “You’re the one with the long fingernails, so you can do it more easily than I can.”

“Oh, no,” she said, “these nails are purely decorative. I can’t do anything with them.” She explained that her artificial nails were so tightly glued on that if she put too much pressure on them, they would yank her real nails right out of their beds.

The phrase “form follows function,” which was a guiding principle for 20^th-century architecture, has somewhat fallen out of vogue. It’s become permissible for architects to add ornamentation to buildings even when it doesn’t serve any practical purpose. However, I don’t know of any serious architect who would design decorative elements that diminish the usefulness of a building. I wonder why that principle doesn’t also apply to hats, fingernails, and other elements of our daily lives.