No Comment!!
My friend Lavande Lamour sent me this today and it sums up my feelings quite succinctly!
Posts Tagged ‘Hats’
Royal Wedding Hats and Royal British Style in General!
Saturday, May 7th, 2011
I fianally had a bit of time to look over magazines and review the royal wedding last night! And look carefully at the wedding guest’s much talked about Royal Wedding Hats. I have always been a great fan of hats, so I was interested to see what the fuss about all the guests hats was about! And I actually hated the hats! Yes! I hated them. Here’s why:
A hat should flatter a woman’s face and body, not detract from them. All these hats did the exact opposite. They took over. They looked ugly and ridiculous. They made mockery of the women who wore them.
A hat should never distract and detract from a person. It should only enhance her. You should always see the woman and her face and naturally remark on her over all beauty, not just gasp in horror at the gaudy or distasteful hat she is wearing.
In contrast the bride and her sister really stood out because we could see them, their faces, their hair. The ridiculous hats served one purpose. They made the bride and her sister stand out as having good taste and restraint. If this was the plan it certainly worked!
I own a good collection of beautiful flattering hats. Not one would make me look ridiculous! I would never wear a hat like any of those wedding guests wore. It is more than possible to get an attractive hat. It is amazing to me that all those people with all the money they had to spend collectively managed to look so terrible! Poor taste was on display. A parade of it unfortunately. It did give the press something to talk about!
For the rest of my life it will make me think twice about what I ever put on my head! I’ve always been careful of this, but this royal wedding hat fashion fiasco will make me even more so! The British have always been world renown for their poor taste in formal attire. Take note of the head to toe pastel ensembles the queen always wears! They are always dowdy and frumpy and in incredibly bad taste. She is famous for this style! I never liked Princess Diana’s choices or taste in clothes either! Her wedding dress was awful! As was her trademark haircut. And the style she later grew into never appealed to me either.
The casual normal manner of dress worn by Kate and her sister Pippa is a modern refreshing change. Let’s hope it lasts.
Grace Kelly in Vintage Furs with Flowers Charmingly Demonstrates Dressing Appropriately For Cold Spring Weather While Still Looking Like it is Spring!
Thursday, May 5th, 2011
Exquisite Fur Stole & Flowers!
My favorite - Fur Coat & Spring Hat!
It’s supposed to be spring! Pretty spring fashions – that means pastels and flowered dresses are featured in every shop. Flowers are blooming, but it is so cold out it is hard to get in the mood to wear them! I have a closet full of vintage coats – several furs, a few stoles, and short fur capes and cashmere coats with fur collars. All pretty and feminine. Many in soft spring colors like champagne and pale blue, ecru, pearl gray and beige.
I love vintage furs, especially the coats from the 50’s and 60’s. They are well made, full enough to fit over suits and full skirted dresses, flattering and above all, warm! I absolutely hate being cold. I do not feel pretty or attractive when I am frozen.
The other day I was reading about Grace Kelly and the author said she always dressed weather appropriate which meant warm enough to be comfortable. That made me like her and respect her fashion sense even more than I did already. So I decided to see if I could find some pretty examples to emulate. And, Voila! I did! Here are two of my favorite photos. Aren’t they exquisitely romantic?
I imagine she is wearing a pretty spring dress or suit ~ that matches her hat ~ under the cozy fur coat. She looks warm, lovely, feminine and happy! Because she isn’t cold! I am inspired to dress this way for the next few weeks. Probably until the Fourth of July the way it is going around here! A quick check of the weather worldwide tells me it is the same in a lot of other places ~ Vienna, Paris, London, Moscow, San Francisco, New York, Tokyo and Seattle are all cold today and it is May 5th!
I don’t know when these two pictures of Grace were taken, but they look like April in Paris in the 50’s to me. I do know the one on the right, in the fur coat, was taken after she became Princess Grace of Monaco. And that is all the explanation I need to be inspired by them! From now on I say furs worn with flowers as accessories are in for spring! The dainty gloves are charming too and serve the purpose of keeping your hands warm. And I love the hat with the flowers cascading over her forehead.Dressing like this epitomizes fashion as a feminine art. Just lovely!
Great Green Felt Vintage Hats for Saint Patrick’s Day
Wednesday, March 16th, 2011
Green Vintage Hats for Saint Patrick's Day!
The Irish love hats. And I love wearing a green felt hat on Saint Patrick Day. Being of Irish decent and having red hair and green eyes I learned long ago that this was a huge hit! Walk into any nice restaurant and bar in your charming green hat and every man in the establishment offers to buy you a drink and dinner. Men love these green hats. And the women who wear them on Saint Patrick’s Day! The one on the glass head is a “Daschette” by Lilly Dache. The one in the back with the two covered buttons is by Stetson for Women designed for Maier and Frank in Portland Oregon. The plain round one is a fur felt beret by Tosca of Italy. It is plain and simple alone or can be easily adorned with a clip or flower from your own collection. All these hats are from the 1950’s. Christian Dior advocated adding a clip to a plain hat to personalize it. The Daschette with it’s black ribbon is undoubtedly inspired by the cloche hats of the 1920’s. And would be adorable with a black flapper dress and a cacoon style black satin coat, matching green tights and black low heeled shoes. In fact, I think that is what I will wear tomorrow! With a long strand of green flapper beads as well! There is a painting by Edward Hopper in which a woman is sitting in a restaurant wearing just such a green cloche hat. I distinctly remember her hat! I will try to find that painting over the next couple of days and post it so you can see her hat. I often find good inspiration from paintings and drawings for how to dress!
Christian Dior on Hats in 1951 ~ “Now We Come to the Most Pressing Problem of This Time. Shall You or Shall You Not Wear a Hat?”
Friday, March 11th, 2011
Hat from Spring 2011 Dior Collection
“I think that in town you cannot be really dressed without a hat. It is really the completion of your outfit and in another way, it is very often the best way to show your personality. It is easier to express yourself sometimes with your hat than it is with your clothes. Hats are important!
A hat can make you look gay, serious, dignified, happy – or sometimes ugly if you don’t choose it well! A hat is the quintessence of femininity with all the frivolity this word contains!
Women would be very silly not to take advantage of such an efficient weapon of coquetry.
And with hats it is the same as with handbags and your clothes – always select the best possible materials.
In the winter velvet and good quality felts are lovely and very versatile and you can get wonderful, rich colors in those materials.
Fur is lovely, too – and besides being warm a little fur hat is very feminine. If you cannot afford a fur coat but yearn for a little something fur for cold days, then, by all means, have a fur hat!
The line of a hat is just as important, too, as the line of your frock. Too many hats are just “shapes” cluttered up with numerous decorations in the form os feathers or flowers. If a hat has a good line it will still be attractive without any trimmings as all.
Equally when you have a hat with a good line don’t clutter it up with a bunch of flowers you suddenly have a whim to wear!
For summer, little silk or straw hats are very nice – and I purposely say “little” because they are much more convenient to have than big ones. You quickly tire of having hats with enormous brims and except on very still summer days they are difficult to wear elegantly – you do not always want to be holding onto the brim!
Of course on the right day and for the right occasion – like a garden party – nothing is nicer or more provocative than a really big hat, sometimes covered with a profusion of flowers.
For sport or in the country, I do not very much like hats – unless rain wind or strong sun draws them back to their original use which is to cover the head.” From the entry on Hats in Christian Dior’s Little Dictionary of Fashion published by Abrams in 1951
As Lady Violette I am delighted to see that Christian Dior used the term important hats! And that he says a hat is one of the best ways to show your personality. And he goes on to say that hats are the quintessence of femininity and are such an efficient weapon of coquetry!
A Charmingly Veiled Cocktail Hat - Spring 2011 Dior Collection
The hats pictured are by John Gallianos for Dior 2011 Spring – just before his firing! Too bad! He was and still is a brilliant designer!
See my next post for a Dior hat in an ensemble designed by the master himself.
