A Top Accessory : Looking for a way to express your fantasies? To funk up your wardrobe? To give it that certain<i> je ne sais quoi?</i> It’s simple: Try hats.

Between skullcaps and watchman’s caps, riding styles and floppy brims, summer hats cover more than your head.

They cover your fantasies. Wanna be a world musician, a grunge queen, a dandy, a limo driver, a churchgoing peacock, a Janis Joplin my-ol’-lady look-alike?

Get a hat.

Italy’s Dolce and Gabbana plucked inspiration from famous hippie haunts. For summer, they paired super-flop, flower-print hats with bell-bottoms, frock coats and granny gowns.

New York’s Anna Sui, a fashion stylist who left the world of photo shoots behind for her own designer label and a SoHo store, has put psychedelic skullcaps atop see-through, crochet dresses.

And in Los Angeles, there is hardly a designer who hasn’t matched straw garden hats brimming with flowers and ankle tickler skirts. The look is a local summer staple--and, by sheer coincidence, the trend makes sense.

“As sun protection, a hat is even better than a sunscreen,” says dermatologist Patrick Abergel, a clinical assistant professor at UCLA with a private practice in Santa Monica. “As long as it isn’t a cap.

“Caps don’t cover your ears, and ears are a prime area for skin cancer because people forget to put sunscreen there.”

A top-ranking sun protector, Abergel says, has a brim of five inches or so, large enough to shade the ears and the lips. Garden hats are his first choice.

Some Los Angeles designers see a big brim as a sort of blank canvas.

“Anybody can put a flower on a hat,” notes Phyllis Yates. Many of her customers come to her from the First AME Church, where she is a member. “My customers are flamboyant. They want rhinestones, tulle, pearls. All in good taste.”

To set the right tone for her richly decorated hats, Yates swathed her Chapeau Designs shop on Martin Luther King Boulevard with carpets that remind her of grand old hotels.

Josephine Baker and all of Fred Astaire’s dance partners are the style-setters who inspire her most--and they would look right at home in her shop. Yates studied her craft with Wilma Rhea, who designed hats for the ‘50s Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper.

She started her business at her kitchen table, opened a shop on Pico Boulevard in 1983, bought a hat-making factory two years later and now produces a wholesale line, along with her one-of-a-kind styles for the store. Her retail prices start at about $100.

Andrea Marcum, whose Drea Kadilak label is a favorite among Hollywood costumers, actresses and fashion stylists, uses the back of her La Brea Avenue shop as her studio. The open shelves are filled with vintage hat blocks, boxes of velvet leaves and other hat trims, and rolls of grosgrain ribbon.

Her classically inspired designs have a softer structure than vintage models. But she keeps the feeling of bygone eras by decorating hats with faded silk flowers, silk lettuce leaves and other whimsies from France and Germany.

“People are influenced by hats they see in movies,” Marcum says. “After ‘Henry and June,’ everybody wanted to look like Anais Nin.” For Marcum, that meant a run on small brim hats decorated with flowers that catch the spirit of ‘30s Paris, where writers Nin and Henry Miller were young lovers.

“It’s OK to be nostalgic, but you have to give it a twist,” she says. Her kind of twists set several of her latest creations apart, including a burgundy straw riding hat with a square crown, and an ivory straw bowler with silk rosebuds blooming at the top.

“We’re in Hollywood--there’s always a need for fantasy.”

Marcum studied at UCLA and in Florence, Italy. She learned to make elaborate corkscrew cocktail hats and other showpieces, but her simpler fabric hats, especially some made of grosgrain ribbon, are the styles she recommends for beginners.

“A sewn hat is one step up from a baseball cap. It’s not like you’re going from owning no hats to owning a big brim hat you’ll never wear.”

She recommends several colors for first timers. “Hats are like cosmetics--there are certain colors you would never put near your face. Periwinkle blue looks good with almost every skin tone. So does ivory.”

Drea Kadilak prices range from $25 for fabric caps to about $150 for decorated straws.

Eric Berghas made hats for runway shows by Van Buren, the Los Angeles club-wear label. And his Dietrich-inspired straw hat with the brim that dips to one side went to Madonna’s costume closet for the upcoming movie “Snake Eyes.”

Others in his latest collection are a jug hat with a saw-tooth hem, a tricorn that looks like it was cut from a lace tablecloth, and any number of hats with brims that he folds, pleats, or stretches into subtly uneven shapes.

“I like things to be a little bit off, a little goofy,” says Berg, an Oregon transplant who never formally studied hat making.

“I’m most influenced by the older women who always wear a hat,” he says. He noticed one the other day. The woman was in her 70s and her straw hat, shaped like a Chinese rice bowl, was only one of her memorable accessories. Others included a chain choker and a pair of funky old sunglasses.

“She was living out her fantasy,” Berg says.

He lives out his own fantasies in the Hollywood Hills apartment where he makes his off-kilter creations. Whatever else, “there is a softness in the structure,” he says.

His Berg Junior label (available at Romp on Melrose), on skullcaps and limo-driver looks, starts at $25. His designer line, priced from about $100, is at Polkadots & Moonbeams on Melrose. And he will show his latest styles at Neiman Marcus, Beverly Hills, on May 21 and 22.

Fashion directors say no matter whose name is on the label, soft shapes are their best sellers now. A quick sampling shows that skullcaps and berets rank highest at Nordstrom. Undecorated straw hats are almost as popular. “They are adaptable to any wardrobe--ethnic, vintage and other,” says June Rau, regional fashion director.

At Fred Segal, best-selling hats are the same styles for women or men. Berets worn traditionally or pushed back to imitate a backward cap, are hot items. So are Greek fisherwomen’s caps, which are very soft with a very small brim.

“People want to funk up any outfit with just one hat, “ says Mara White, women’s buyer at Segal. That seems to be the idea behind this summer trend.