Hats

Why don’t women wear hats anymore?  (Disclaimer: I do not consider females with fedoras in Us Weekly women in hats.) I’m talking about real women in proper occasion-appropriate hats.  I have a special affection for beautiful women in hats.  My best friend Kristin Phillips was a brilliant milliner until she passed away tragically in 2003.  My mother, for as long as I can remember has worn a hat every day.  She wore chic paperboy hats in the 60’s, big floppy-brimmed felt hats in the 70’s, brightly colored stiff straw hats in the 80’s, and still sports a mean rain hat at even the slightest hint of humidity.

I have definitely inherited the hat gene, although mine only plays itself out at expensive ocean-side resorts as part of a 60’s mediterranean fantasy I have.  So while I do not necessarily think we all need to sport a Phillip Treacy butterfly headdress to go pick up some milk down the road (one can only dream,) a little of the late Izzy Blow’s dress-up philosophy could inject these brusque, abrasive times with some needed gentility.

Here are a few of my favorite hat moments with some of the best hat faces in history – my mother, Brigitte, Audrey and the face for which all hats have been unwittingly created – sheer hat face perfection – Swedish actress Ewa Aulin.

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