WOMEN: Fit to be Tied

Women’s hats were hot news last week. Mad as hatters were U. S. milliners, still reeling from a $6,000,000 half-year business slump brought on primarily by feminine hatlessness. Charles Steinecke Jr., editor of Hats, millinery trade journal, editorialized grimly:

“. . . A critical period. Last year we waited until the resort season was well under way before awakening to the realization that women were going about hatless. . . . Right now when fashion displays are being planned is the time to start combatting next year’s Summer hatlessness.”

Headgear went into high. Newsreels focused on feminine noggins; newspapers broke out in a rash of page layouts of hats. Peruvian Artist Reynaldo Luza, commissioned by Harper’s Bazaar and Bonwit Teller, Manhattan department store, to travel South America for three months, returned with a trunkful of sketches, a whole new fashion vocabulary (samples: montera-hat, chullo-chin-tied cap, tonguito-Bolivian derby). Hat shows popped in Manhattan salons: Sally Victor, Lilly Daché, Milgrim were busy.

What designers termed “exotic” was mostly just cockeyed. The hats that made news were goofy as a psychiatrist’s casebook. Prime example was the market-basket hat: a round straw basket stuffed with miscellaneous fruits, with a dead chicken drooping over the forehead. Another dilly was the Christmas shoppers’ special: three skinny Christmas boxes tied together with a red velvet bow, all poised dizzily on the head. A third headgear triumph was “Thanksgiving at Home,” a neat subsistence homestead including a red barn for the crown (barn doors ajar), a shock of corn, a fence and assorted barnyard items on a broad sassy green brim.

With the trend to off-the-face hats, brims had become ornamental windcatchers, offering no facial shelter from the sun. To overcome this, Sally Victor installed a miniature marquee under the brim, a striped or starry awning to be worn up or down. Success went to Designer Victor’s hat. She forthwith installed awnings on evening hats, too.

Another startler was the wig hat, on which a cascade of hibiscus blossoms fell from a black felt pillbox, making the wearer look like Harpo Marx in an unusually casual moment.

These were chiefly publicity hats. Real hat news came in the off-the-face trend, the deepening American (North & South) influence, the ever trickier use of man-catching veils, little sailors with star-spangled veils starched as stiffly as a ballerina’s skirts, spun-glass gold-&-silver evening turbans, little South American caps, fit to be tied under the chin, picturesque big turned-under brims in “high, high” colors: buckskin beige, Apache rust, Cherokee rose, Warpath red, Indo-China orange, morning-after purple.

But U. S. designers trying to take over from Parisians seemed to have gone overboard with gag hats. They were trying to sell hats the way Steve Hannagan sells Miami Beach.