I was sent the MEAME Polaris Cap to review along with their MEAME Alpha reflective tweed jacket.
I own quite a lot of tweed. I have a few tweed suits and jackets, a tweed sponge bag (a birthday present...) and even a tweed ski suit (long story but involves a promotional stunt for a tailor called Barrington Ayre). But not a tweed cap, so this was a welcome addition to my collection.
It's quite hard to review a cap, of any description. You put it on your head, it either fits or it doesn't and then you decide whether you like it. Or not.
The Polaris cap certainly fitted me, as I think these pictures show.
Do I like it? Hmmm. My wife said it looked as though I was headed off to The Shed End at Chelsea Football Club, which used to be full of the hardest core nutters before football became gentrified. Worn with the tweed jacket, it was all a little too much...you can definitely overdose on grey herringbone tweed and I felt I was. I took it on a trip to Cheltenham racecourse but it looked a little out of place amongst flat caps and trilbies (does anyone really wear a trilby any more apart from at a racecourse?).
I didn't really feel it was suitable for cycling but that is because I always wear a helmet. We could get into an exciting debate about whether helmets should be compulsory or not but I'll leave that for another day and perhaps suggesting that you should wear a tweed cap instead of a helmet isn't going to enhance your position in that debate. It has MEAME's clever reflective fabric, which consists of millions of tiny beads that reflect the light and show up in car headlights, so it will definitely improve your visibility in the dark, but it just won't give much protection if you land on your head in a crash.
So, for me, I thought it was a good looking cap but I struggled to find occasions to wear it. It has a Teflon coating which means it is somewhat water repellant and it is stylish but perhaps it would be better off on the heads of a younger, more fashionable audience than me, parading the streets of Soho and Hoxton rather than Tufnell Park and Gloucestershire.
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