Hats should be essential

"It's not the shoes, though, that makes the girl look so strangely, so weirdly dressed. No, it's the fact that she's wearing a man's flat-brimmed hat, a brownish-pink fedora, with a broad black ribbon. The crucial ambiguity of the image lies in the hat. (...) No woman, no girl, wore a man's fedora in that colony then. No native girl, either. What must have happened is: I tried it on just for fun, look at myself in the shopkeepers glass, and see that there, beneath the man's hats, the thin awkward shape, the inadequacy of childhood, has turned into something else. (...) I take the hat and am never parted from it. Having got it, this hat that all by itself makes me whole, I wear it all the time. With the shoes it must have been much the same, but after the hat. They contradict the hat, as the hat contradicts the puny body, so they're right for me. I wear them all the time too, go everywhere in the shoes, this hat, out of doors, in all weathers, on every occasion. and to town.”

The fragment above is from Marguerite Duras' The Lover, and I quoted it here not because it's one of my fav books (which it is), neither because I wanna discuss Jean-Jacques Annaud film, but simply because I wanna write a little post about hats, the hats I would like to wear and the hats I think I would never wear, but deserves to be remembered here. By the time Duras, as a french teenager lived in the old Vietnam, fedora hats like the one actress Jane March wore in the film were made only for men. A young girl wearing one of those at that time seemed as unique - or eccentric as a woman wearing any hat at all - would normally be seen these days.

I don't know about the city where you live, but from where I come from, wearing hats outside the beach catches a lot of attention, and I'm not talking about approving eyes, but the very opposite. If a woman wears a hat in Natal, people in the streets will stare at her as if she looked like a circus freak. First of all, there's not even proper stores in my hometown where you can buy nice hats, unless that is a 15 minutes trend going on, like the newsboy caps back in 2003. Also, there's the fact that the heat can be unbearable at some point, and I admit it's not really comfortable to wear such a piece in the awfully hot weather. But wasn't it terribly hot in the french colonial Vietnam in 1929?

When I came to Denmark, I thought things would change. That I could wear all the hats I ever wanted to and it would be so perfectly natural, after all, it's Europe, "people don't have these silly prejudices over there" - I thought. How deceived I was. Ok, if you're in Copenhagen, no one will really stare at you on what you wear, but here in Randers, oh well... Maybe small cities in metaphoric terms always meant to be the same anywhere in the world. And as for the fact it's easier to find hats here, it's not really true. The good ones can be found in a few places, it's not like you will go all the way to H&M or Accessorize that you'll find your dream hat. In Copenhagen, there's a male hat store located in Strøget that has existed since 1857, and they have the exact male fedora hat I'd like to wear.

I've been told short-haired girls might look too boyish by wearing male fedora hats, and unless you have nice long curls, it's not a good idea to wear it. But rules exist to be broken, plus, i gotta a very womanly figure. I guess it says enough. There's another hat I'd like to have, but I'm not quite sure it would look good on me. It's the cloche hat, which I've always praised, but I definetely fell in love with it when I saw King Kong in 2005. Naomi Watts character looks so adorable with her little gray hat on. Oh, I love the 1920s. A while ago I could see the film again, and as the weather wasn't warm yet, I had the thought this could be the perfect hat for me during the cold months. I think a black one would be the right match for my red coat. I've found a very old store in Randers where they make handmade hats, which is very popular among the local old ladies. Young women can be so clueless.

A couple of weeks ago, looking for fall/winter inspiration, I found this picture, but i don't quite remember where I saw it, I'm almost sure I found it on The Sartorialist archives. It was everything I was looking for, and seeing a girl making this fall look works beautifully in the streets made me happy and inspired.

"I've met another man. He's the best man I've ever met. He's bright, handsome and he's crazy about me. And, he's married. There's only one thing; he doesn't like my hat."

The line belongs to Lena Olin's Sabina in the brilliant film The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I haven't read Milan Kundera's novel, but in the film, Sabina is an artist that has a not so well explained aversion to conventional relationships. She's mysterious and seductive, and what makes her even more peculiar is the bowler hat she wears during great part of the film.

Like Daniel Day-Lewis' character says at some point, every woman has a single detail that makes her totally unlike any other, and Sabina's detail is her hat. Not hard to disagree on his opnion, as Sabina looks quite femminine wearing the sort of hat that made Chaplin figure iconic. And what about Diane Keaton in Annie Hall? She wore a floppy bowler hat in male vests, an image that's hard to forget. I prefer Lena Olin though. And at present times, I adore the fashion editorial where model Guinevere van Seenus appears wearing different versions of this charming little hat. Unfortunately i don't know which magazine featured it.

Another male hat easily recognizable is the top hat, commonly worn throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, by wealthy men who intended to state their financial and social power.
The hat had a revival in Hollywood in the 1930s, when the wonderful Fred Astaire wore it in different musicals, not only in Top Hat. I think I would never wear such a hat, though a modern version of it looked cute in a young Kate Moss, but maybe that's because she's Kate Moss. Another remarkable film image involving a character in a hat was brought to us by Martin Scorsese. A 13-year-old Jodie Foster walking around the dirty streets of NY in a flowery top, hot pants and floppy hat in the must-see film Taxi Driver.

Three decades before Taxi Driver, a swedish lady was immortalized on screen while wearing a low-slung Fedora. Ingrid Bergman always looked sexy and classy in films. Though as mentioned in a couple of paragraphs above, I'm the kind of female who finds Bogart's hat more appealing. But i guess the award for the lady who wore hats the best goes to Audrey Hepburn. I don't know if it has something to do with her noble roots or her inner sense of style, something so hard to be achieved by other women, and yet so natural to her. Nevertheless, no matter what kind of hat she wore, she always looked so chic and femminine, so simple and yet unique. It could be a big floppy hat in Paris - When It Sizzles or those adorable litte hats in even more adorable 1950s dresses in Funny Face. She had it all.

But what about now? I personally don't find any inspiration in any hat-celebrities these days, maybe except for Britney Spears (yes, you heard me), but that was a couple of years ago, when I had a crush on newsboy caps. Now i can't bear them. And what is up with those cowboy hats? I don't really get them. It looks good in Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, that's all. Newsboy caps, along with knit hats are the most commonly worn these days, though the fedora hat has made a huge comeback. I personally don't think it's reasonable to blindly follow all season trends, but if you really adore hats, and timeless hats like i do, i suggest you to find which one will look the best on you, matching your style and facial features.

Don't stick too much in rules and if you're brave enough, you'll stand out wearing your beloved hat no matter if it looks trendy at the moment or unusual - and for that fact - , eccentric in the eyes of narrow minded people. Unless you're wearing something inspired on Ascot ladies. Then I'd be one of the people staring at you in the street.