How to solve the hat-iquette issue
The scariest thing about the summer season? You’re going to need a hat, says (American)
Ican count the number of times the Duchess of Sussex has worn a hat on one hand: Christmas. Anzac Day. Palace garden party. Trooping the Colour. Royal Ascot. OK, slightly more than one hand, as there was also that white Marks & Spencer flibbertigibbet for that society wedding. And, on every occasion, I’ve felt for her as she reaches up to discreetly check the position of her headpiece and imagined how she feels about the hatwearing aspect of her new career: “Really? If you say so…” This weekend’s Madewell fedora looked much more her thing: casual, classic and cool.
Three words that no fascinator could ever hope to emulate.
Americans don’t do hats, barring big church weddings, the
Kentucky Derby and motherdaughter charity teas, and if you’re really drunk, a plastic cowboy one picked up in Target on the way to a
Fourth of
July party.
It’s why we’re so into blowouts (no place to hide a messy barnet) and why Oprah looked like she was about to set sail at the royal wedding.
And why, when my husband-to-be and I told his mother we were engaged years ago, I was taken back when her first thought wasn’t to congratulate us, but to ask: “Josh, can I wear a hat?”
She did, with great aplomb, and I didn’t think about hats again until my UK citizenship ceremony – wearing one just seemed the proper thing to do. But hats have remained on my personal fashion periphery since then. Right up until Royal Ascot, when suddenly I was expected to be in possession of both a hat and a developed opinion on how to wear it. There’s a certain innate ease to the way most British women wear hats that only daughters of the most Anglophilic Americans can ever hope to emulate. For the rest of us, hat-wearing still seems faintly exotic – and a little silly, and a touch terrifying, and maybe a bit Hyacinth Bucket, in equal measure. We’re paranoid about getting it wrong. Unless it’s all in (on?) my head… “Americans desperately want to wear hats, don’t you think?” milliner Rachel Trevor-morgan suggested from our balcony at Royal Ascot, the moment before the Queen emerged in her
landau wearing a hat of Trevormorgan’s design (a “sinamay and straw side sweep with handmade silk roses and feathers in deep coral,” wouldn’t you know). “They’re very excited about the whole idea, but also very nervous. You get that sense, from the royal wedding, that there’s so much interest. They really want to get it right.”
Trevor-morgan advises keeping an eye on the overall silhouette and trying on as many styles as you can stomach, “because it’s often the one you think you would never wear that works”. The good news is that expertise is easy to access – if only you know where to start. Anyone can take her dress to a well-stocked hat department and ask for guidance. I didn’t make it to a store, but rather emailed Fenwick of Bond Street with the subject line ‘‘help!’’ and photographs of my dress. A publicist sent pictures of hats she thought might suit my dress’s tiny floral print, and I ended up with a pale blue, swirl-topped straw pillbox by Whiteley Hats.
Wearing it, I felt a little like I was in English national costume, and surprisingly festive. Amid the whorls and swoops, and jaunty discs and anaemic floral clusters of the Royal Enclosure, I realised that one of the most cheering aspects of Royal Ascot is how clearly everyone has made an effort. Sure, hats may be about adherence to a dress code, but they’re even more about making an outward expression of high regard – for the occasion, the company and the woman underneath all that sinamay and straw.
Of course, as Meghan learned after her Christmas poo-emoji experience, enjoying wearing a hat one time does not an expert make. After lunch in a box where I was surrounded by milliners and other accomplished hat-wearers, I headed down to the railings. A kindly racegoer took one look at me and, with equal parts pity and kindness, said: “Your hat is in the wrong place, dear.”
With a gentle shove, she pushed it to the other side of my head. The reorientation made all the difference. I’ll know better for 2019 – though I’m already planning to go bigger next time around. I may be American, but I am British, too, after all.
Emily Cronin