Meet Her Elegancy, Queen of Her Closets : Collector: Dona Evans of Santa Ana has saved almost everything she has worn since 1953, including hats, gloves, shoes and jewelry.

Dona Evans opens a faded gold hatbox and pulls out a billowy creation covered in ostrich feathers that has been preserved in tissue paper for 40 years.

Like a time capsule, the hatbox and its contents recall the days when a woman was not considered fully dressed unless she was wearing a hat and gloves.

Evans remembers the era well.

In the ‘50s, while still just a teen-ager, she developed a love for glamour and began to cultivate an extensive wardrobe. Although her claim to royalty was limited to a stint as Miss Chevrolet and Miss Yo-Yo for Duncan Yo-Yos, she often dressed like a queen in flamboyant hats and gloves that matched her outfits to perfection.

“Back then I never walked out the door without a hat and gloves,” Evans says. “You didn’t feel totally dressed without them.”

Evans found a way to preserve this age of elegance that all but vanished in the mid-’60s: The 58-year-old Santa Ana resident has saved almost everything she has worn since 1953, including a few bustiers and bras.

She has stacks of hats--at least 50 by her rough estimate--in their original boxes. She snaps open an old suitcase stuffed with gloves of every length and color, at least 200 pairs in all.

She would rival Imelda Marcos with her immense shoe collection, which has taken over her linen closet. In four decades she has worn out and discarded only two pairs.

Evans has held onto all of these things for one reason:

“I always hoped they’d come back in style,” she says. “And they are starting to come back.”

Her collection would be the envy of museums, vintage clothing buyers and anyone who loves fashion, except that Evans has never bothered to show them off.

Not until one of her friends began encouraging her to come out of the closet has she begun to unveil her treasures. She says she is thinking of forming a club with others who share a love of vintage clothing and hopes to loan her items to a museum for an exhibit. What she has could fill a small gallery.

There are picture hats with ostrich plumes dyed deep shades of fuchsia, royal blue or purple, and others with silk organza cabbage roses covering their wide brims. There’s a turquoise garden party hat with a square-shaped brim decked with silk roses--a real head-turner.

Among the purses she has saved over the years: funky footlong envelope styles in metallic ‘50s colors like pink and turquoise; hard plastic handbags, some with mother-of-pearl and metallic confetti inlays, and a tiny brass bag that looks like a miniature bird cage.

She has boxes filled with costume jewelry, including complete “suite” sets of matching earrings, necklaces, bracelets and brooches.

“I always wanted things to match,” she says.

She has unusual pieces such as a single leaf-shaped earring of thin gold-toned metal and faux pearls that curls over the top of her head like a miniature hat, or a leafy pair of black-and-white sequined clip-ons that extend above the earlobe instead of below it--designed to be worn with a swept-up hairdo.

Some of her ‘50s-era shoes look new, such as the clear plastic mules with colored rhinestones or the pumps covered in a floral-printed black and ruby silk.

Vintage dresses, most of them fitted sheaths and a few of them originals designed by Mr. Blackwell and left over from Evans’ modeling days, still hang in her closet.

“I still drag them out and wear them because they keep coming back in style,” she says.

Among the baggies filled with old gloves: a bright orange short pair and an above-the-elbow avocado pair from the ‘60s, as well as assorted gloves in almost every shade of blue, from robin’s egg to royal.

Evans’ collection was born out of an appreciation for elegance, a word that turns up often in her vocabulary.

As a child she played dress-up with her mother’s hats, handbags and clothes. She loved watching old movies like “Gone With the Wind” that showed actresses in beautiful ball gowns.

“I thought, ‘I would love to get into those,’ ” she says.

Evans grew up in the exclusive areas of San Diego, but she says her family was never wealthy like many of their neighbors. In high school she remembers envying the girls with huge wardrobes. She says her father was conservative; he thought that having a different outfit for each day of the week was sufficient for a girl. Evans thought otherwise. She can still remember the name of a classmate who had “endless cashmere sweaters.”

How she was able to acquire her inventory is a tale of hard work, determination and a passion for fashion.

While going to school she started earning money to buy clothes. She sold flowers, washed dishes, knit and sewed clothes for people and worked part time for the phone company. She spent the money on accessories like hats, handbags and her beloved cashmere sweaters that she could not make on her sewing machine.

With an eye for quality, she would put a cashmere sweater on layaway and pay it off in monthly installments.

“I sold telephone stock to buy a white fox fur stole,” she says.

A receipt for a blue feathered hat found tucked in a hatbox reveals that Evans never scrimped on her wardrobe. The price of the hat, purchased at Bullock’s in Santa Ana in 1956, was $62.40--no small sum in those days, especially for a working girl. Yet Evans quickly points out that many of her hats cost more than $100.

Evans always wore the clothes well. Although she complains of having “football shoulders,” her 5-foot-6 frame with its hourglass shape was tailor-made for fashion.

As a teen she modeled for a tony store in San Diego called the Fashion Quarter. Models were expected to supply their gloves and shoes, which only added to Evans’ inventory. Through her modeling work she was able to acquire gems like her Blackwell originals.

Evans’ blond good looks led to her reign as Miss Chevrolet. She wore bathing suits and strapless gowns she made and posed by shiny Chevys at promotional events from 1957 to 1960. She also drove around in a Cadillac in one of her big picture hats as a promotion for the company.

Her Miss Chevrolet title led to a brief gig as Miss Yo-Yo; she was the glamorous blonde handing out prizes at yo-yo contests.

Now an enrolled agent/income tax expert, Evans still adds to her wardrobe. She frequents Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom, looking for one-of-a-kind merchandise. She saves the new items too.

Still, she misses the glamour of the past. She complains that people don’t “dress” anymore. Even Hollywood actresses look “trashy.” Few women, she says, have the elegance of Princess Diana (“she almost always wears a hat”) or the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

“Elegance is being lost,” she says, “and I don’t think it should be.”