Crowning Glory

The hat section at Nordstrom--it’s actually “millinery,” but just try calling a department store nowadays and asking for millinery--the hat section was aglow with Easter egg-colored spring straws, and I was trying on some of them.

A couple of twentysomethings stopped and picked up a rose-pink number, pale as a sunrise, then an ivory-colored straw and, last, a linen-looking wide-brimmed chapeau. The young women had multiple piercings about their faces. A bit of tattoo crept out from under a short sleeve.

I watched them try on the hats, clumsily, giggling and striking poses as if they were 8 years old. Finally, one plunked a hat back on the rack.

“I couldn’t wear one of these,” she declared. “Everybody’d be looking at me.”

Oh, honey, I thought--you’ve punched holes in your face, and you’re worried that people will stare at you because you’re wearing a hat?

Women will wear just about anything labeled “fashion”: jeans cut so low you could keep them on during an appendectomy, nosebleed platform shoes.

But not that most enticing and useful accessory, the hat.

They actually have forgotten how to wear them. Just look on EBay at the pictures of clueless sellers modeling chapeaus. The elastic band that goes under the hair at the back of the head is described as a “chin strap”--worn like that, it’s more like a garrote, and they don’t even allow those at Gitmo.

For women to forget how to wear that most fetching feminine ornament is as big a catastrophe to befall chic as forgetting how to wear lipstick.

Whatever happened to hats?

Once they were as necessary as underwear, and movies reflected it. Scarlett O’Hara’s rebelliousness is captured in one daring green chapeau. In “Witness for the Prosecution,” Tyrone Power first encounters the woman he ends up murdering by watching her through a milliner’s window. In a Walter Mitty moment, Danny Kaye is Anatole of Paris, exacting his revenge on women by designing ridiculous hats. Nowadays men do that by designing women’s shoes.

For decades, for centuries, it was the bareheaded woman who was conspicuous.

Then, suddenly, the hat went MIA. It went out with Jackie Kennedy--who mostly skipped the pillboxes for a lacquered semi-bouffant that defied millinery as it defied the elements. It vanished with surfer girls and Beatlemaniacs and hippies (save for the Janis Joplin floppy hat, the antithesis of hats-as-architecture). Hats were a uniform, and uniforms were out.

Now we’ve fetishized hair and abandoned the hat. Some fashionista is always predicting its comeback, calculating that, like a stopped clock, he’ll eventually be right. Faye Dunaway’s beret in “Bonnie and Clyde,” Ali MacGraw’s knit cap in “Love Story,” Diane Keaton’s “Annie Hall” fedora, yet still no breakout moment for the hat.

Thus, people today call any hat “weird” simply because they so rarely see one--like a show of ankles on a Victorian street. Women are always telling me wistfully, “I wish I could wear hats.” Anyone can; everyone used to. It’s not about the hat--it’s about the attitude.

A hat is mystery, glamour, playfulness, style. It defines personal space and projects personal taste. Hair can accomplish only so much; a hat can do anything. It is warmth in winter, shade in summer, a blessing on a bad hair day, a capstone on an outfit. A new hat is as soul-thrilling as a new pair of shoes--and it never, ever pinches.

Here are some hat rules women once knew by heart:

You have to wear the hat. The hat can’t wear you. Put it on right and don’t think about it thereafter; you will, as they say on the runway, “own it.”

Don’t slap it on the back of your head like Heidi milking the goats. A hat isn’t a bra; there’s no one right way to wear it--although Mr. Brock, the benevolent despot of millinery at Bullocks Wilshire and later Neiman Marcus, would place it on your head like a crown and expect you to keep it that way. Tilt the hat, turn it 180 degrees, pull it forward on your forehead until you find what looks best.

Check yourself in a full-length mirror, not a little face-size looking glass. That’s how the world sees you, head to toe.

Mate the hat to the ensemble. A beret dresses it down; a structured hat dresses it up. A floppy sun hat looks goofy with slinky black velvet, and a couture chapeau fit for an aristocratic wedding can look like you’re joking if you pair it with jeans and a T-shirt--unless you are deliberately joking.

I’ve been supporting the millinery industry single-headedly for years. Pitch in--help me out. And let that prognosticating fashionista be right, just for once.

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Times staff writer Patt Morrison can be reached at patt.morrison@latimes.com.

Ask Patt Morrison how many hats she has and she’ll tell you: “Not enough.” Take a video tour of her hat rack at latimes.com/magazinehats.