Hats: accessories we need right now
Logic suggests this is a very bad time to be a milliner. Weddings, Ascot and royal garden parties are off the menu. What is there to dress for?
The prospect of holidays in our garden and a long spell of sunshine is helping sales of straw hats reach lift-off. Plus – and this is my own, not entirely scientific theory – even a modest 8cm brim throws an optical cordon sanitaire around you. No one will breach the two-metre rule when you’re suitably brimmed up. It’s too much effort.
Yet as a new book of hats from Dior illustrates, it’s this habit hats have of encapsulating their times that makes them compelling. That, and their construction.
In almost all cultures throughout history, headgear of some kind became de rigueur for all classes. Hats became so cumbersome in the Gilded Age that a Countess Greffulhe formed The League of Little Hats in order to stop hair constructing getting out of hand.
In the Twenties, an obsession with modernity ushered in small, neat cloche hats, in direct contrast to the ever larger wire and iron-framed picture hats of the Edwardians.
Forties hats were often made from paper and wood shavings – although what they lacked in circumference they sometimes made up for in height. A hat wearer has to express her defiance where she can.
At Dior they never went away. Maria Grazia Chiuri, its current creative director, loves a beret. Raf Simons, her predecessor, had a penchant for minimalist, translucent abstractions. For 30 years, this grandest of French houses has had its millinery dreams fed by the supremely British milliner, Stephen Jones, one of several contributors to this generously illustrated, absorbing book.