“…you cannot really be dressed without a hat” – said monsieur Dior.
True, back then, so much unlike now, a fashion game was more about covering than revealing for both men and women.
Head wear by itself has a long history that bustles through the cultures and ages, carrying many functions besides the obvious one.
It would serve to state one’s social and marital status, nationality and ethnicity, and on top of that, the markings of the wearer’s personality and taste.
In ancient Russia, for instance, unmarried girls were showing their hair in the braid and topping them with pretty folk diadems, while it was considered a dishonor for a married women to expose their hair in public, and so it was hidden under the variety of head pieces that served as a brief data on a wearer’s identity.
Those styles kept on echoing head wear in later centuries, like shawls that are still popular, or “kokoshnik” that sometimes influences Haute Couture looks.
Every nation has it’s own millinery past rooted in historical hallmarks, and nearly every nation nowadays has given up those traditions, at least for daily street trends.
No complaints about that in some of the cases, and thank God that the other ones are not completely forgotten. The idea of dressing up your head with something other than your hair is still a magnet for the fashionistas all around the world.
The lure of the head pieces even long after they stoped being a social or religious mandatory is easy to explain: besides adorning the face they may correct it’s shape or help balancing it’s features.
It’s truly not for everyone though: imagine a less than perfectly sculpted face with no help of hair styling whatsoever – a nightmare for some ladies. I would still say, there always will be at least one perfect head piece per head, but not everyone is confident enough to embrace the attention it will inevitably bring.
As a designer, I always felt the inner need to add a head piece to my looks. I believe they help to tell the story, bringing a mainstream of the concept into the flow of the collection.
It would be so much fun to bring it in our everyday life as well.
Imagine if that was to happen, there would be endless possibilities of styles!
It also might help our nationwide posture problem caused by our mobile phone’s enslavement and the general abandonment of the young lady upbringing principals that we surrendered to subscribe to the modern notions of cool slouchy attitude.
Well, I am not giving up. Here is my next Hat, born from my dreaming of the Ice Queen, the cold beauty, the magic of the iridescent colors shooting sparkles under the sun.
After all, any head piece is as close as we can get to a crown, so why not to become a queen in your own make believe world, especially if your hat makes you feel like one.