Fashion's 'Silly Little Hats' Move From Runways to the High Street

At Loro Piana, whose clothes are popular among technology executives, hats appeared with almost every look. Thom Browne showed straw boaters wrapped in colourful mesh. Chloé paired see-through hats with see-through trenchcoats and placed white sailor hats on all-white outfits. Courrèges went space-age, Burberry showed large bucket hats, and Bottega Veneta sent out hats the report described as brimming with charisma.

David Long, author of The Hats That Made Britain: A History of the Nation Through Its Headwear, said that setting aside beanies and baseball caps, hats are a rare opportunity for display. He said wearers were trying to say they are not like everyone else even though people nowadays wear the same clothes, adding that they are showing off, but only a little.

Noel Stewart, a milliner who has made hats for Mulberry, JW Anderson and Valentino, said hats can be a major signifier of personality and intent, and that whether it is shouted or whispered is up to the wearer.

The look has reached mass-market retailers. Asos and H&M are selling wool and pillbox hats that the report linked to Jackie Kennedy. In John Galliano's new collaboration with Zara there are Napoleonic-style bicorne hats, as well as one design that resembles a fashion version of the millinery worn by the woman feeding the birds at the end of Mary Poppins.

Pillbox hats were a common sight on the streets of Copenhagen during the Danish capital's fashion week. Stewart said people want to be chic without being too forced or expensive about it, and that a soft pillbox is a very good way of doing that.

Some may see the hats as a way of standing out from the crowds in baseball caps. Stewart said there is a time and a place for every hat, noting that he was wearing a baseball cap at the time but that it is not all he wears, and that people need different hats for different moments in their lives.

Wearing such a hat on an ordinary weekday still takes some nerve. Kennedy, who wrote to Bergdorf Goodman before moving into the White House in the early 1960s to place an order for a million hats and became the most famous pillbox wearer of the 20th century, also wrote that it had been pleasant when she did not have to wear hats, that they would pauperise her, and that she still felt absurd in them.

Editor's Summary

Hat designs that emphasise personality rather than protection appeared across Milan's spring shows and have since reached Asos, H&M and Zara, where pillbox and bicorne shapes are on sale. Milliners and historians quoted in the report describe the hats as a small, deliberate form of self-display, while noting that wearing them still requires a degree of confidence.