Hat Designers See a Return to Millinery Mania of Past
Inside the Village Hatter, where everything from tiny pillboxes to 10-gallon cowboy hats line the walls from floor to ceiling, a thirtysomething woman tries on a floppy felt hat and looks admiringly into the mirror.
“I love this,” she says, turning her head back and forth so her husband can get the full effect of the red chapeau.
Instead of offering the expected compliment, however, her husband lapses into hysterics. When he’s able to utter a few words, they’re not the ones she’d hoped to hear.
“That hat,” he says, still chuckling, “was the laugh of the day.”
Since hats risk making one look silly, many women who claim to love them never wear them.
“I hear a lot of women say, ‘I love hats but I’m too embarrassed to wear them,’ ” says Annie Goodman, co-owner of the Village Hatter in Fashion Island, Newport Beach. “They’re afraid they’ll be too conspicuous and people will stare at them. But that’s really the point.”
All that changes on Easter Sunday, the one day of the year when a woman can wear a hat with all the frills upon it and not feel painfully self-conscious.
“I had two women in here the other day picking out hats to wear with their Easter dresses,” Goodman says. “I don’t think they would have bought a hat otherwise.”
Hats cause heads to turn. They’re worn by those who want to make a fashion statement.
“Hats really change the look. All the attention goes to the head,” Goodman says. “Can you imagine Ingrid Bergman without her hat in ‘Casablanca?’ Or Indiana Jones? Or Humphrey Bogart? They’d just be short guys.
“Look at Princess Di. Would she be Princess Di without a hat?”
Indeed, women have looked at the princess in her stylish hats and liked what they saw. After years of going bareheaded, more women have started wearing hats year round, not just at Eastertime.
“We can’t make hats fast enough,” says Frank Olive, a New York-based millinery designer for 30 years. Olive hopes for a return in the ‘90s of “the days of great hat-wearing, when millinery designers had different signatures--an identity, a look.”
His clients include Joan Rivers, Carol Burnett, Diana Ross, Ivana Trump and Morgan Fairchild.
“My customer,” he says, “is a very playful young lady who is looking for her first husband or replacing an old one. She’s play-acting.”
Olive’s hats have garnished the fashion collections of such leading designers as Oscar de la Renta, Carolyn Roehm and Bob Mackie. His spring collection at Neiman Marcus in Fashion Island and at South Coast Plaza features elegant chapeaus made of fine woven straw, some lacquered to give the hat a dressy sheen.
Many look like they’re from “The Great Gatsby,” such as his pink straw hat with a drooping brim, tall round crown and pink straw bow for $142, or the bright blue bonnet with a wide brim and small, flat crown and blue bow for $152.
Olive’s hats are never gaudy. He adorns them with touches of ribbon, bows and flowers, often in the same color as the hat to give his creation a monochromatic look.
“I like understated fashion, even if it’s dramatic,” he says. “I’m not flamboyant. I like the subtleties of life.
“When my customer walks into a room, you don’t see a hat walking into the room.”
No single silhouette dominates hats in 1990 the way Halston’s pillbox did in the 1960s or the cloche did in the ‘20s.
Hats come with brims measuring anywhere from two to nine inches and crowns that lay as flat as a plate or rise up, bowl-like, from the head.
Like Olive, many milliners have decorated their hats with subtle, feminine trims. A sheer floral scarf wraps around the crown of a pink straw boater. Netting drapes across the brim of a black, oval-shaped pillbox with black silk flowers perched on the top. A rhinestone triangle-shaped detail accents the front of a red pillbox.
The shop has a line of cloches by Marga made from soft straw and trimmed in antique lace and beaded appliques, available for about $210.
Picking the right hat can be hard for people unaccustomed to this daring accessory. Not only should the hat match one’s outfit, Goodman says, it should also complement one’s own shape and size.
“We’re not going to put a small woman in a wide-brimmed hat--it will overpower her,” she says.
Women also tend to wear hats too far back on their heads. Goodman demonstrates the proper way to sport a boater, pushing it forward so the brim shades the face and strangers must make an extra effort to peak at one’s features.
“Hats make people wonder, ‘What does she really look like?’ ” Goodman says. “They create that air of mystery.”
