The tiptop in fashion

Crowns.

They wear crowns.

Big, beautiful elaborate hats bejeweled with imported crystals that dance in the sunlight streaming through stained glass windows.

Fancy creations abloom with iridescent plumes, oversized roses and sweet violets, perfect for pulpit or pew.

Elegant chapeaux trimmed with fur, Belgian lace or flat-back pearls that stand out nonpareil in church.

In Southern California, epicenter of casual dressing, there are exquisite holdouts, women who adhere to the traditions of their mothers and grandmothers, women who wouldn’t dream of leaving home on a Sunday morning without covering their heads, women who wear fine hats, head-turning and, perhaps, one of a kind. And there is no better time to witness their splendor than Easter Sunday.

Step into the cathedral of West Angeles Church of God in Christ on Crenshaw Boulevard. Visit Victory Missionary Baptist Church south of downtown. Worship at Apostolic Faith Home Assembly on West Adams, a boulevard of churches. And don’t forget a hat.

“My mother would turn over in her grave, if I [went] to church without a hat. She would say, ‘I taught you better!’ ” Bettye Smith says while shopping at Leola’s Hats and Accessories on Florence near Crenshaw.

Smith, 81, came of age in Fort Worth, during a more formal era when black ladies always wore hats to church. As a child, she was taught that “a church hat is not supposed to attract attention to yourself. You’re sinning if you take attention away from the service, if they’re watching your hat.”

But those rules have changed.

“You can still be a holy woman and you can be very fashionable,” says Anthea Butler, an associate professor of theology at Loyola Marymount University whose specialty is African American religious history, who also heads the Society for Pentecostal Studies.

Sonja Robinson, who specializes in church hats at her stores, One-of-a-Kind Hats on Slauson Avenue and on Crenshaw Boulevard, says current fashion calls for heavy ornamentation: crystals, rhinestones, feathers and even fur. And Robinson is nothing if not steeped in the culture of hats: She belongs to West Angeles, which is known for its hats. Indeed, when the Church of God in Christ denomination holds its annual convocation in Memphis, she says, some women who attend take a dozen or more.

“What color are you wearing for Easter?” Robinson’s daughter and co-designer Meeka Davis asks a regular at the One-of-a-Kind boutique on Slauson, near the pockets of black affluence in Ladera Heights, View Park, Windsor Hills and Baldwin Hills.

“Either mint or white,” the older lady responds.

“Mint. I like color on Easter,” Davis advises on a recent day. “White would be good for Mother’s Day.”

Easter and Mother’s Day remain the most popular Sundays for fancy hats in many black churches, Robinson says, adding that business is up 50% at this time of the year at her stores. She stays busy because many of her customers want a different hat for every Sunday.

Davis confides, “I have a customer who buys a new St. John knit every week. And she buys an extra piece such as a skirt for me to make the hat.”

Matching is paramount, experts say; the last thing customers want to see in church is someone else wearing the same hat.

The creations that Robinson and Davis design, block, colorize and trim range in price from $150 to $1,000 -- and customers like singer Patti LaBelle, who bought six a couple of days ago, don’t bat a mascaraed eye. The most extravagant hats are displayed in “the pink room” at the Slauson boutique.

Surrounded by bright pink walls, Babe Evans is trying on a lavender cloche, lavishly hand-beaded, jeweled and swathed with custom-dyed fox, and priced at $480.

She inherited her love of hats from her mother. “She didn’t wear a hat every day, but she always wore one to Bethel AME [San Diego]. She looked like she stepped out of the pages of Ebony magazine.” An actress and a producer of the recently completed Los Angeles Women’s Theatre Festival, Evans owns 60 hats.

Some of One-of-a-Kind patrons own 250. “A lot of these ladies have hat rooms,” Robinson says, with special shelving and glass to keep dust from settling and brims from bending.

At least one devotee of Leola’s Hats and Accessories owns many more.

How many hats does Smith own?

“Hundreds,” she replies.

On this day, Smith is buying more. She chooses the most expensive one in Leola Speed’s eponymous shop. Designed by George Zamau’l, it is a black felt cloche, hand-beaded and covered with glittering rhinestones, with three mink tails dangling from the back. Smith says it will match two suits that have the same rhinestones.

She also picks out a glitzy metallic gold cloche with a flurry of petals, rhinestones and twin roses by Tim Crawford, an African American designer based in Philadelphia, for a birthday gift. For another friend, she selects a kiwi green, wide-brim summer straw by Mr. John Classic. For her niece she buys a sparkling black and silver, side-profile cloche by Jack McConnell, a preferred designer for generations of black church ladies.

“I have a girlfriend who only buys Jack McConnells,” she says.

Don’t ask how much Smith is spending on hats because no proper lady will discuss money in public. But the owner of Leola’s Hats and Accessories will have no trouble paying rent.

A retired social worker, Speed opens her shop only on Saturdays. Most of her clients are “middle-aged church ladies, 50 and above,” she says. Quite a few belong to African Methodist Episcopal churches. Many are Baptists and, like Speed, have Southern roots. She knows their tastes well; she attends New Hope Missionary Baptist Church on Central Avenue.

Stature. Respect.

How has the tradition of the hat continued in an era when women wear jeans everywhere?

“Dressing appropriately has never been out of fashion in the black church, and for many women wearing a hat completes their ensemble,” says Karen E. Hudson, coauthor with Karen Grigsby Bates of the revised etiquette book “The New Basic Black: Home Training for Modern Times.” She adds, “It’s a sign of respect.”

Modesty is the genesis of women covering their heads.

For black women, the custom comes from Africa, according to Loyola Marymount’s Butler. “African women wore different head coverings to denote who they were, what tribe they came from, their status,” she says. “When they came over during the slave trade, they used whatever material they had to make elaborate head coverings.”

As Christianity spread, she adds, slaves and free blacks adhered to the biblical injunction, in the first book of Corinthians, that instructs women to cover their heads when praying.

“During the post-slavery Reconstruction period, if you had a little bit of money you bought a hat to show you were respectable,” Butler says. “You had stature.”

In the days when most black women either worked in the fields, or cooked, cleaned and cared for white children who called them by their first names, respect sometimes came in the form of a hat. In their Sunday best and hats, they were Sister, Mother, Mrs. or Miss, equal in the eyes of the congregation and even leaders in the church.

Gail Wyatt, a psychiatry professor at UCLA, says many black women continue to dress up because it “symbolizes that they understand this is an important event that they take seriously. They understand the rules of dress, have the appropriate clothes and demand the attention and respect that is given to those who assume ‘the look.’ ”

Hats were the focus of a gathering at the California African American Museum in Exposition Park on a recent Sunday. Wearing sweet little pastel pink hats, Tiffany, 5, Tulliah, 3, and Tattiana Martinez, 2, marched with more than 100 properly hatted black women, a smattering of men in derbies, porkpies and kufis, and maybe a dozen more bonneted children.

Babe Evans joined the parade in a stovepipe hat, vibrant green and gold and made of straw -- one of seven hats that she donned that afternoon.

They were participating in “It’s Sunday. Where’s Your Hat?” -- a tribute to the tradition of African American women wearing church hats, part of a series of cultural programs sponsored by Target stores.

Dr. Dorothy Shepherd stood out in a gold hat from the collection of African American designer Time McClendon of Los Angeles. “I was born and reared in Memphis, Tenn., and we dressed,” she said. “We were taught image is everything.”

At the museum, all hats faced forward as Evans, now wearing a basic black wide-brimmed hat, and Marlowe Wyatt, in a soft, white wide-brimmed hat, began to read excerpts from “Crowns,” a popular off-Broadway play by Regina Taylor based on the book “Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats,” a photo book full of anecdotes by Michael Cunningham and Craig Marberry.

“Back when I was a little girl, I thought hats had a mind of their own. Every woman in our church, Nazarene Baptist Church, wore one,” Wyatt read from the play.

Evans responded: “If the hats liked what the preacher said, they’d bob up and down. If the hats liked a song, they’d sway from side to side. If a hat thought you were talking too loud, it would whip around in your direction. And if a hat was really angry with you, its brim would dip just above a mother’s eyes, and those could be some fierce eyes.”

Hats dip, flip

It’s Palm Sunday and the hats are glorious at Victory Missionary Baptist Church in South Los Angeles. Nearly every lady of a certain age (and older) wears one. Several wear matching gloves.

Hats dip, flip, turn up, turn down, swirl around and around in royal blue, white, forest green, yellow, red, creamy ivory, chocolate, purple, sea foam, butterscotch, silver and gold.

Bettye Smith is seated, as is her custom, in the second row. In the pew, she has a hatbox for a “birthday girl,” Annie Bell Rankins.

And, how old is she?

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” she says. “I am way up there.”

Rankins doesn’t know how many hats she owns, but she owns a lot. “I don’t need more hats,” she says. “But I want them.”

Doris Dillon doesn’t know how many hats she has either. As she walks under a row of crystal chandeliers, tiny rainbows sparkle from her dramatic black hat. A Jack McConnell.

As the talk about hats continues, Dillon inquires, “Have you been to West Angeles?”

It’s Palm Sunday, and the hat queens are bling-blinging at the West Angeles Church of God in Christ on Crenshaw Boulevard.

Rhinestones, sequins and all things that glitter bounce off the spotlights that light up the main floor. There is black mink, yellow fox matching a yellow fox stole, and brown mink.

Hats appear shinier, bigger, higher, fancier and more exotic in this $62-million cathedral. Though the church can’t accommodate all 24,000 members, downstairs is packed and the balcony as crowded. Many worshipers wear nothing on their heads, which makes the hundreds of hats more pronounced. Seated demurely on the pulpit, Mae Lawrence Blake wears a tailored straw bowler in navy blue, tilted at an angle. Many members say they have never seen her wear the same hat twice, a tradition among many first ladies, who are the wives of bishops and ministers.

West Angeles’ very own hat makers, the ladies of One-of-a-Kind, are showing off their product -- Sonja Robinson in a black velour lampshade piped in crystals with a wide black iridescent rhinestone band, an 8-inch brim and a high crown; Meeka Davis in a snug red velour profile, covered with red crystals and pearls, also with a high crown.

As the choir exalts, a black hat keeps time with black-gloved hands that smack and shake a tambourine. A gold hat trembles as its wearer praises God, speaks in tongues. Hats bob as their wearers clap and stomp. Hats nod, sway, rock.

“These are our crowns. Black women are very regal. We’re queenly,” Robinson says. “These are our crowns.”