Hats, Hats, and More Hats! A Gay and Enticing Range

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 220, 13 June 1936, Page 23

Hats, Hats, and More Hats! A Gay and Enticing Range

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The hat parade is on again! Midseason presents to us as gay and enticing a range of millinery .as ever woman could wish for. Modistes have sounded the "Internationale” with it style trend which derives its inspiration from jnany countries an inteiuational league,of notions that, despite its diverse roots, has yet an nulled front, of chic femininity, of playful gaiety. Seemingly holus-bolus, yet actually with intuitive discrimination, they have seized on all that is naturally adaptable to our modern needs. They have commandeered (he decorative, the lantastic, vet —paradoxically enough—the practical, from all lands, all cvituries, all orders. So we have tall and winged Flemish hats, dashing Peruvian sombreros. Chinese mandarin caps and coolie hats. Breton matelots complete with streamers. Add to these the waggish. modern pill-box—appearing this time wedded to the new (or 15th century) lattice snood, the beret—masquerading alternatively a< a student ■

iam, a square-fronted shovel hat. a tambourine disc worn straight, across the brow; the 1900 boater and the conventional bowler. Scatter these in your imagination with a whimsical array of veils—long and drooping, romantically dipping, stiff, perky, .flyaway. alwavs decorative. \ isualise a host of minute flower-swamped toques, of. business-like Tyrolean and fedora sports hats spiked with quills or with little coloured feather "flies” tucked in their ribbon bands —you have a comprehensive idea of late winter millinery 1

To lie more previse, it is a mode ilmt adapts itself to the individual rather titan requiring the individual to concede toil. You can choose precisely the hat that flatters you most, if you are seventeen, ingenue, for your tailored suit you wear a sombrero of green felt lined with black. With largish upcurled brim and crown that narrows at the top, it is distinguished by a black ribbon sliding chin strap held to the crown through a slit on either side by two round yellow buttons. Or you wear a navy Breton sailor with streamers of ribbon striped red. yellow, green, white and blue. The ribbon encircles the back of your head close to the hair and pulls through the brim in front. x\t. cocktail

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time you wear the enchanting Flemish concoction at Hie bottom right-mimi corner of my sketch. It is made of 'civet to match your frock, and has black cire ribbon round it ami a circular spotted veil, a fob to sophistication. If you are forty or more, you may choose to dress your age—perhaps in I a tiny toque made entirely of peacock feathers with a looped grosgrain bow hugging the hair at the back—or you may prefer to choose the favourite hat of your career, reproduced in detail, and put on with a modern slant. For instajice, there is an encbantingly frivolous boater—right out of Gibson girl days—on the front of which bob light-ly-bunched violets, with an infinitely delicate veil falling over the eyes. Again, there is the Hower-trimmed toque also shown in my sketch —of fluted grosgrain, it has headlight blossoms of dusty blue ami pink, and a straying veil bunched in the front. Perhaps you are at that delicious age—beginning in the twenties and ending nowhere—that can be dressed either

up or down. According to your type, you choose a hat that is ingenue, sophisticated; old-world, modern, feminine. boyish; flattering or merely smart. Then the world is yours. You can have any one of the hats on this page; the jaunty fedora witli gay-coloured quill; the box-crowned and absurd grosgrain hat which, though planned geometrically, yet uses that most feminine of artifices—the veil: the toque or theFlemish bonnet, and a host of others. Sailors are doing surprising things —frequently they have both flowers and veil. -Mandarin caps walk right out of Chinese prints—Agnes hangs a clipped' feather just like a pigtail, down the back of a brightly embroidered silk cap. Fluted brims of grosgain or felt recall renaissance trends, Italian opulence. Berets worn like tammies on the back of the head are stitched all over by Descat, who makes a navy blue taffetas one with a band high across the brow and a girlish butterfly bow trailing its ends at the back. An aristocratic Flemish peasant hat has wide pointed wings u,nd :t cobweb splaying veil. When bonnet buying, refuse to be conservative, yet be wary of the starkly original—your hat should be provocative, never obtrusive.