It used to be the unwanted present from an elderly aunt. So how did the woolly hat become fashionable?

Fashion's ability to turn full circle is one of its loveliest aspects. As one trend laps round another, we eventually end up wearing what we once loathed and ridiculed. It makes fools of us all, while making us think we are trendy, which is exactly how it should be. This Christmas, one fashion stands, quite literally, head and shoulders above the crowd to illustrate this very point: woolly hats.

My first remembered brush with such things came when I was seven years old. Staying up late to wait for Christmas midnight mass, I opened a present from an aunt in Italy to find a woolly hat, in red. I adored it but eventually gave it up to the back of the cupboard as something I wouldn't be seen dead in. And thus it was with woolly hats for years: something worn only by children young enough to still have a loyalty to whichever (invariably) female relative had made it for them; until they saw sense and realised that fashion wasn't about staying warm. It was about looking cool. Until, that is, such time as staying warm seems like a good idea again - about the same time that you realise you don't know what the No 1 in the pop charts is any more - and you start quoting that "80 per cent of body heat goes out of one's head" in justification.

That's how it was until this year, when woolly hats became so hot they're cool, thereby making it fashionable to stay warm. But because fashion can never be completely about comfort, woolly hats actually started being worn by the most stylish folk in the hottest heat of last summer: at the Glastonbury festival, it seemed every head was capped in wool.

It's important to identify the exact genus of woolly hat that is currently at the pinnacle of fashion. It is nothing with a bobble, ear flaps, tassles or a brim; it's not like a beanie hat, which sits at the crown of the head, leaving the ears exposed. No. The woolly hat that is at the head of the fashion table is as worn by the musicians Badly Drawn Boy or Enrique Iglesias. For those catwalk groupies - and I know you're out there - it was as shown in the autumn/ winter 2002 collections of Jil Sander, Marc Jacobs and Emporio Armani. It is a hat worn completely and tightly to cover the hair and ears, sometimes pulled far down enough to cover even the eyebrows. And it must be in wool or a wool-look fibre. Not fleece or felt.

"They always look like their mothers have pulled their hats down," observes Kate Fox, the social anthropologist and co-director of the Social Issues Research Centre. "There's something very vulnerable and childlike about this trend."

Society has a lot to feel vulnerable about at the moment, and the head is the part of the body we instinctively feel most inclined to protect (although I know some men would argue with this). Perhaps this is why we see woolly hats worn in situations where the wearer feels most exposed - and not just to the cold. They featured regularly in the recent reality TV shows Celebrity Big Brother and Pop Idols. First, one person started wearing a woolly hat, and then, as days passed, others would borrow it to cocoon in. It is the grown-up, trendy version of Linus's comfort blanket.

In recent weeks, David Beckham, first the subject of kidnap threats to his family and most recently internet rumours about himself, has been wearing his woolly hat quite a bit. Surely it doesn't get that cold stepping from heated luxury vehicle to heated luxury home. If it's a fashion indicator of the hunted or the caught out, I'm simply counting the days until we see Cherie Blair's dark, flopsy hair tamed by one.

Sadly, I doubt we shall. I've never seen a politician, or a politician's moll, wearing a woolly hat. It's much too much like window-cleaner chic for them (as with everything, they miss the point). Cherie is more likely to don a "glamour turban", which is the equivalent of a woolly hat for the glamorous older woman (namely, Liz Taylor and Joan Collins). The glamour turban has the added advantage of giving its wearer a mini face-lift (which is why it is worn), while the woolly hat offers no such cosmetic enhancement.

The woolly hat trend has even reached Germany, where a woolly-hat-wearing singer called Ben has been topping the charts so seductively. It has led the entire German population to reach for their needles to knit their own version. Not that there is time for knitting now - this trend has just weeks to live. In the meantime, we can enjoy a rare crossover: being fashionable while also being warm.

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