I can feel it, Spring is in the air and has been for about a week. The new season colours are in the shops and I’m itching to wear a new pink/melon brightly coloured top.
Soon, the train journey will become a sweaty endurance to work and the hat band of my wool baker boy or my leather beret will start to chafe. It’s been a three year quest to find a summer hat. You’d think it would be pretty easy but so many hats are either inappropriate for Summer wear because they’re too structured and made from heavy materials or they are substanceless, silly and scream someone on holiday. A Summer hat should still finish an outfit, blend in and look intentioned. It should be interesting, preferably cover the whole head and be unfussy. In this camp I consider anything wedding like or too avant garde like Issy’s lobster hat.
No one makes a good Summer hat. I don’t want a straw boater or some odd pastiche of what Summer should be. Shops like Accessorize which excel at Winter hats, beanies, cloches etc, utterly fail when it comes to Summer. If you’re used to wearing a hat this becomes very frustrating because to suddenly not wear one feels…strange. It’s like leaving the house without perfume on. I don’t do it.
I confess to a slight obsession with Stephen Jones, partly because of his long collaboration with John Galliano, partly because he makes hats which are both wearable and just daring enough. My leather beret, part of the Miss Jones range fits this criteria. Though the V&A exhibition of Jones’ work wasn’t quite substantial enough for my hat hunger, my mother and I still enjoyed it. I think wearing hats is in our DNA. So, I was super excited to have acquired a Miss Jones Summer cap. It’s made from lurex lace, has a pretty little downward pointing peak and is gloriously light. The colours shot through the black lace make it wearable with anything. It arrived yesterday; I am in love.
My quest is over.
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