Fad Hatters

It started almost as a joke.

A few years ago the young patrons of L.A.’s underground club scene began donning oversized, homemade top hats splashed with polka dots, stripes and flowers and oozing with equal parts whimsy and irony.

The style drew on the exaggerated shapes worn by such characters as the Mad Hatter from “Alice in Wonderland” and roguish cereal pirate Cap’n Crunch.

It also echoed the spirit of Haight-Ashbury, where wacky fashion was in vogue during the blur of the late ‘60s.

The $15-to-$75, foot-high-plus hats are still the rage at Southern California’s beat-heavy underground rave parties. “A majority of people who buy top hats are teen-agers who go to raves,” says Celina M. Perry, a saleswoman at Beverly Center’s Maddest Hatter hat shop. “And they sell very fast.”

“I like being the center of attention,” says 18-year-old Brenda Garcia, “so I try to wear a different top hat every time I go to an underground party.”

Now, wacky hats are surfacing outside the rave scene, turning up at such mall mainstays as Nordstrom and Macy’s and on rap performers Digital Underground and Flavor Flav, who regularly sport odd-ball, reversible top hats by a local company called Venetian Paradise.

Increased demand for their wacky hats has put a strain on the tiny company, says co-owner Magnus Walker. At the recent New York International Fashion Boutique convention, he notes, buyers from around the country placed orders for nearly 5,000 hats.

“Everyone wants them in less than six weeks,” says Walker, 24, a British transplant. “We’re not keeping up with orders.”

Two years ago, the company would have been lucky to make 100 hats in week and sell a few dozen at its Venice boardwalk hat stand.

Today, Venetian Paradise’s five-person factory in Venice is working overtime to fill orders for up to 600 hats a week.

Walker and partner Linda Lagasse started patching up used jeans more than two years ago, before they switched to the hats.

“When we first made the hats,” he says, “a lot of people laughed. But the people who laughed at them two years ago are now wearing them.”