For Hat Makers, Spring Is a Heady but Hectic Season

Spring is surging toward summer. The sun is beginning to blaze, and outdoor activities beckon.

While most turn to a simple baseball cap or a functional visor for sun protection, some opt for more flamboyant sun shields. And a small, specialized cadre of artists is ready to help.

Milliners, also known as hat makers, are a diminished but stubborn group of artists who serve a faithful niche of women--those who insist on the right accessories for fashionable spring and summer events.

In this, their busiest season of the year, milliners are stocking up on vintage flowers, lacy netting and unshaped straw. They help outfit women for outdoor summer activities from hiking to weddings, gardening to horse races.

This weekend’s Easter and Passover holidays, when women often pull together their best spring ensembles, mark the height of the milliners’ season.

“This year it has just been insane,” said Lynda Burdick, who runs Woman With a Hat Company out of her Silver Lake home and has made hundreds of hats to sell at stores locally and elsewhere in the Southwest.

Friday, while she checked the dye on mint and eggshell girls’ hats and hand-stitched the brim on a 2-foot-diameter hot-pink hat, Burdick took a call from a store in Arizona: A woman awaiting a custom hat had failed to mention that she needed it by Easter.

“They were saying, ‘Where’s her hat? Where’s her hat? She was in this morning looking for it and she needs it right away,’ ” Burdick said, laughing and shaking her head. “I shipped it yesterday. She’ll get it today.”

Each week from January through the summer, milliners fill orders for thousands of mass-produced hats sold at stores. Some are picture hats with feathers and lace and ribbons. Others are simple cloche hats that resemble flapper styles of the 1920s.

For their best customers, they finger the fine linen of spring suits and satin of wedding gowns to produce elaborate custom designs.

In the weeks leading to Easter and Passover, many work 12-hour days, seven days a week to get the hats on waiting heads.

Louise Green--of Louise Green Millinery Co.--said her staff of 14 works a lot of overtime during “crunch time.”

Each of her 14 years in business has brought the same rush, she said, though the styles have shifted a bit over time.

“For some reason, the Easter crowd is buying the bigger hats this year, and the temple ladies are doing the smaller hats,” she said. “It’s just a trend.”

Other trends this year: brightly colored hats to go with the rainbow of summer fashions, and anything with animal prints--except python hatbands, which are very fashionable but illegal in California.

“The more flamboyant, the better,” Green said.

This season, hat-wearers--men and women--are hot for cowboy hats with leather bands.

Though milliners say they have always had a core of devoted clients, some bemoan the demise of the hat as a fashion statement.

Russell Brock, whose business title at Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills is “millinery specialist,” has been making or selling hats for more than 60 years. But he no longer wears a hat himself. “Things change,” he said.

Still, he relishes memories of a bygone time. “In those days every woman had to have an Easter hat,” he said.

Now, he said, the only customers who must have hats are those who come in under doctors’ orders. But health concerns from skin cancer to wrinkles are bringing something of a resurgence in hat making.

Still, said Brock, “I’ve never had a bad season. It’s a matter of making sure you have what customers like.”

Friday, he helped one customer match an Easter outfit and gently coaxed another into a silk bowler to cover her recently shaved head after surgery.

Then a woman who had just tried on a white, strapless linen gown approached, trailed by a friend carrying a load of shopping bags.

“It’s still here,” Brock called out before she could speak.

He headed straight for the section housing hats by Eric Javits, a designer from New York, and pulled out a wide, white off-the-face straw hat, the brim rising from the front and tucked slightly under in back.

The woman, real estate agent Susan Capps, needed a hat to match her dress, which she would wear at the upcoming Kentucky Derby. She had already bought one at Saks Fifth Avenue, but Brock talked her into the $275 Javits.

The horse race, held the first Saturday in May, will be the 13th she has attended.

“I know the drill,” said the Kentucky native.

Of course, people will attend to watch the horses. But, she said, every woman in the crowd of more than 100,000 will be wearing a big, fancy hat.