Please take the hats off, ladies, they just make you look silly!
As Anna Friel hits Ascot with a pigeon on her head ...
THE saying ‘mad as a hatter’ goes back to the days when hat-makers handled mercurylaced chemicals which sent them round the bend. But perhaps, after Ladies’ Day at Royal Ascot last week, it is time to alter it to ‘mad as a hat-wearer’.
Did you see the dead pigeon Anna Friel wore on her head? At least we must hope it was dead. The actress had chosen a pretty, rust-coloured dress by Ermanno Scervino. She fitted it perfectly and wore it with plain heels and an unshowy handbag.
How elegantly coquettish she could have looked had she only left it at that. But on her head was fixed a crazy mish-mash of pigeon feathers and corkscrewing ribbon-work. Eeeek! She was fortunate no passing hawk spotted her and mistook her for lunch. Sorry, Anna, but it was a hat-astrophe. Hats (toppers for men, summery efforts for women) have always been a part of the annual June race meeting at Ascot.
This year, however, things went a bit bonkers. One racegoer turned up in a hat designed to look like a ram’s head, complete with horns. Another wore a giant rose-petal bonnet by the milliner Tracy Rose, about 2ft high and twice the width of her shoulders. She needed one of those ABNORMAL LOAD signs they give to lorries transporting wide cargoes.
At what point does it stop being a question of a woman wearing a hat and become a matter of the hat wearing the woman?
Milliner Michelle Foley had devised a swirl of feathers and tubings which resembled a halfgutted pheasant. I loved the grimace of the poor woman who was wearing that terrible hat.
Her expression effectively said: ‘I know it looks like roadkill, and I’m going to kill my fashion adviser next time I see him.’
A woman in Dame Edna sunglasses and a side-bunch of roses had a double-wizard hat perched on top of all that. She could have stepped from the pages of a Dr Seuss book. Did we laugh with her or at her?
A little jollity is fun, but there is a point at which the desire to be zany becomes tiresome and self-glorifying. The hats at this year’s Ascot were too self-conscious to count as English-eccentric.
WHEN Sharon from accounts tries to replicate the late Isabella Blow (that celebrated madcap hat wearer) the result is invariably mirthless. Women’s hats, always dangerous territory for husbands and boyfriends, have become totally alien territory to men.
Many of us no more understand the urge to wear a hat than we comprehend pregnant women’s nesting instincts or the desire of certain Amazonian tribespeople to place Wagon Wheel biscuits in their upper lips.
Women spend hours — days, weeks, months! — planning their hats for weddings, school speech days or civic events.
The footmen at Buckingham Palace must have a right old laugh when they see the hats waddling down the Mall for a royal garden party. What parades of pretension and frightful taste.
High-society author Nancy Mitford, after attending Princess Alexandra’s wedding in 1963, wrote witheringly about the congregants’ hats. She said they must have been ‘made by somebody who had once heard about flowers but never seen one — huge muffs of horror’.
I don’t mind a woman in a hat so long as it is practical. My wife looks adorable in the floppy, straw sunhat she wears when she is gardening or reading by the pool on holiday.
But the constrictive nature of hats at an ‘occasion’, when conforming to society’s expectations, can be off-putting. Men find the whole palaver irksome and claustrophobic.
Women coo over one another’s hats and spend a fortune, sometimes hundreds of pounds, on just a few inches of twisted wire which has been covered in felt and called a ‘fascinator’. Baffling. They just look like wonky car aerials.
What is it, this seemingly primeval urge to adorn the head with gaudy ribbons, silks, twisted rabbit-wire and Frisbee-shaped discs?
Do they not develop neck-ache from trying to keep the hats at the correct angle? How do they pass one another in narrow corridors with those Sky-TV dish bonnets? I’ve seen smaller aerofoils on the back of a Porsche.
There was a woman at Ascot with an enormous piano hat, wider than a mass-catering paella dish. How did she fit into the ladies’ cubicle when she wanted to go to the loo? The doorway would surely not have been able to accommodate her.
And all this at a racecourse where you want to be able to see the action on the track! All you’d be able to see on Ladies’ Day would be the back of people’s hats.
Cecil Beaton and the wonderful Audrey Hepburn may be to blame. It was fashion photographer Beaton who came up with the gloriously exaggerated hats Hepburn wore for the Ascot scene in My Fair Lady, the 1964 film based on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.
She was playing Cockney sparrow Eliza Dolittle and there was a need to accentuate the character’s transformation from squawking flower-seller to society adornment.
Beaton’s designs were a parody. He was exaggerating and sending up the oh-so-refined Ascot look.
Today’s real-life Ascot racegoers perhaps forget that, just as they overlook the fact that Audrey Hepburn could get away with hats because she was so slender and had such a long neck (ditto Andie MacDowell, who wore that wide black hat in the 1994 romcom Four Weddings And A Funeral).
Audrey Hepburn also had a sparky personality that was bigger than any hat. That may not always be true of the Jemima PuddleDucks who waddle their way into the enclosures at Ascot every summer.
A short-necked woman in a hat can all too easily resemble a mushroom. The only exception to this rule may be the Queen, whose tall, brimmed, colourful hats have become her trademark.
But even Her Majesty has been known to come unstuck.
In the Sixties she sometimes wore objects that looked more like bathing caps, or occasionally even liquorice allsorts.
And on a tour of America in 1991, she visited the White House and made a speech at a lectern that had been set at the wrong height.
Those of us in the White House garden saw her perfectly, but all the TV cameras could see was her black-and-white titfer, and the next day’s newspapers called her The Speaking Hat.
Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie — both thorough sweethearts, but neither exactly shaped like a swan — repeatedly come a cropper in the hat department.
Time and again they appear at public events wearing hats that, far from adding to their royal dignity, make them look like frumps from Absolutely Fabulous.
How much better they would look going bareheaded than sticking those lumps of fashion silliness on top of their beans.
Alas, there is a sense that hats MUST be worn. Samantha Cameron took a pasting from fashion commentators when she declined to wear a hat to the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton. And yet Mrs Cameron looked terrific.
If only others had followed her lead that day. Instead we had Tara Palmer-Tomkinson in a cobalt-blue hat shaped like a Thunderbirds cap. Most peculiar.
Chelsy Davy, Prince Harry’s exgirlfriend and normally a refreshingly liberated spirit, decorated her head with an apologetic doily.
Princess Anne wore a hat she may have picked up at the Gatcombe flower-arranging circle and Princess Marie-Chantal of Greece went for one of those tall, side-saddle affairs with tea-rose blooms.
It teetered so weirdly on one side of her head that it made her whole body look lopsided.
What a nightmare hats can be for women, and what an imposition. Why do they put up with it? Good feminist that I am, I say it is time we liberated women from their hatpins. Let them wash those hats and fascinators right out of their hair.