Colors for Spring--Keep It Under Your Hat

It’s not that Patricia Underwood has anything against froufrou. “Obviously everyone to one’s own taste,” says one of the country’s most influential milliners.

But to the designer whose hats now accompany the collections of Calvin Klein, Isaac Mizrahi, Bill Blass, Carolyne Roehm and Perry Ellis, a streamlined hat is more useful to a woman in the long run. And that, of course, is the whole point of buying one.

“That’s why I don’t trim my hats,” says Underwood, who is known for dramatic, yet unadorned shapes, from toques to top hats.

Better, she believes, that a woman dress up a plain hat for a special event and then undress it for everyday. “I try to make hats less as objects and more wearable,” she explains.

Want Basic Items

Because clothes and accessories, including her own, have become so expensive--her signature malleable straw hats average around $250, and her winter felts sell for up to $400 at I. Magnin Beverly Hills--Underwood believes women want a few, basic items that can really service them.

“People today want a good pair of shoes, a good handbag, a good hat.”

Indeed, she uses her own shopping habits as an example: The pricey French-made Robert Clergerie suede flats she wears with her Perry Ellis suit on her daily rounds may cost twice as much as ordinary shoes. But “they don’t curl up at the toes.”

In seasons past, good design to Underwood has meant striking hat shapes in neutral colors. But for spring and summer, she has expanded her vocabulary to include 23 sensory-shocking shades, such as orange and violet, pale tones like hydrangea and nectar, and new neutrals froo amber to mocha.

“Color is the main news,” she says. “One is so bored with black. A lot of people wear black, but a colorful hat can perk it up.”

Like a skirt’s length, the size and shape of a hat is determined more by the clothing a woman wears and her facial structure than by one designer’s edict. Wide trousers, for instance, call for a wider brim, while short, fitted suits require something with a small crown, though “not necessarily a small brim.”

For loose, flowing chiffons, hats should be oversized and have a deep crown, and, uncharacteristically, Underwood has embellished some hats with chiffon drapes.

She is one of the lone champions of the near-antiquated practice of daily hat wear. A woman who is a paragon of style is “pale and interesting,” she says--pale, because her face is perpetually sun blocked, and interesting because of the mystique that comes when she puts on a hat.

“One can become very commanding when one wears a hat. They used to say, ‘If you want to get ahead, get a hat.’ ”

Although she is not dictatorial about it, Underwood thinks hats should be worn for any and all occasions: business meetings, picking up children, travel.

Lost Interest

She grew up wearing them at the convent school she attended in Maidenhead, England--gray felt in winter, Panama straw in summer. But she lost interest in hats until she took an evening class in hat making after moving to New York with her then-husband.

Fifteen years ago she opened her tiny New York atelier, and now she make hats for such celebrities as Princess Caroline of Monaco, Diana Ross and First Lady Barbara Bush.

Actually, Bush has never worn hers. Bill Blass sent Bush to Underwood for a hat to wear with the teal blue coat he made her for the President’s inauguration. But, apparently at the last minute, Bush decided not to cover her “lovely silver hair,” and went to her husband’s swearing-in hatless, recounts Underwood.

“When she didn’t wear it, we were all crushed in my little workshop,” Underwood says. “I made the hat myself.”