Round trip; Shine bright; Decked out.
The beret is the latest topper to adopt, and it falls anything but flat.
Who knew millinery could be so rife with political connotations? A glance backward, and the beret has topped the heads of some of the most brazen boundary pushers and cannily courageous in history: from counterculture beatniks (though somewhat a stereotype), punks and Pablo Picasso to political revolutionaries – Che Guevara and the Brown Berets among them. History lesson aside, the beret emerges again in 2017 as a fully fledged top hat of myriad incarnations and nonconformist possibility. It began with Gucci’s beautifully doleful misfits donning theirs at the beginning of Alessandro Michele’s reign. They went on to populate the runways of Acne, Maison Margiela and, more recently, Giorgio Armani and Jacquemus, before reaching haute proportions at Dior in lambskin this season.
It might be the street-wise edge that has the Bella Hadids and Alexa Chungs of this world reaching for theirs, or the element of comfort that keys into the autumn/winter ’17/’18 trend toward cocooning and protection dressing. For Beyoncé, it was a powerful nod to the Black Panthers at the Super Bowl last year. For some, it’s the more simplistic joy of pulling on the small puffed woollen disc and letting it flop to one side with a measure of laissez-faire.
To buy in, look to original beret-maker Laulhère, which has been making angora wool versions of the hat from the foothills of the Pyrenées for near 200 years, to crown the classicist. Or Itchy Scratchy Patchy, with its berets emblazoned with words “Anarchy” and “Respect” that have found their way onto the heads of Cara Delevingne, Pixie Geldof and Adwoa Aboah.
In a 1994 Steven Meisel Vogue Italia shoot, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington dressed as dissident schoolgirls and draped themselves smoking, sulking and smouldering over desks and empty bathrooms. In every shot? A beret. In 1967 a Mary Quant advertisement ran with the line: “Is this just another fad?” in bold letters above a painfully cool squad of mod girls, each with a beret in candy colours. In answer then: like the girl group that skipped out on the last class, we want to go wherever they’re headed, even just for this season.