Hats, Anyone?
Hats, Anyone?
Years ago, you didn’t show your face outside the door if you didn’t have a new hat for spring. Nobody questioned your morals, either, when you said you were going downtown to pick up a cute little sailor. It had nothing to do with short navy men, but had plenty to do with small hats with small brims and usually perky bows. They were called sailors and very much in for spring.
There were also picture hats. The kind that Irving Berlin used to write about. They were large brimmed, laden with flowers and nettings and often framing faces that were not exactly picture perfect.
Women also wore birds on their hats. Gorgeous shades of blue and pink were used for the feathers. Once I saw a hat that had a small birdcage on it with a smaller bird inside. The woman and her hat created quite a stir when the hat came off when she took communion one Sunday. This was in the days when if you went to church, your head would have to be covered. Nowadays people go to church in slacks, some even in shorts, and communion is delivered by a lady in a brown polyester dress.
Where are the hats of yesteryear? Where are the hats that the word ‘pastel’ was coined for? Hats were pastel in spring. Pale pinks, lavender and shy yellows. The hats were gorgeous and worthy of the name ‘hat.’
There were pill box hats before Jackie Kennedy made them famous. Many years ago, these hats also came in many colors and were often well decorated. I remember one in white felt with appliqués of roses. Now those were hats.
Years ago, you didn’t go into a department store and buy a hat. There were special millinery shops that only sold hats. One could spend a whole afternoon there just trying on every hat you had ever dreamed of. Windows in the shops were bedecked with tiny cloches, tinseled turbans, cartwheel hats, half hats and hats that were hand fashioned in the back rooms of the little stores.
What ever happened to the hat? We wear them reluctantly in winter if it’s too cold, but somehow along the way, something happened to the hat symbol. Looking through the stores, I have seen a few. Black cocktail hats, looking like doilies, or some fur hats that look like Cossack’s hats. Nothing that would cure even a blue Monday.
Hats anyone? Yes, I’ll take several and also several pairs of those little white gloves that no woman would be caught dead without in days gone by. But that’s another crusade.