Easter Bonnets

Every year my sister Laura and I wear hats to church on Easter Sunday, and every year we are two of only a handful of women who do so. We've done this ever since we both worked at a hat store called Hats in the Belfry, many many summers ago. The job's only perk was getting to try on the hats, and most of them were not anything I would wear in public. Baseball caps, silly costume hats, and overly decorative horrors crowded out the gems. And doing a bit of an Internet search just now I was overwhelmed by how many truly terrible hats there are out there. No wonder no one wears them anymore. Here are some I actually would wear:









On the left is a sort of modified picture hat that looks good on everyone. It frames the face without hiding it and it's not too big to overwhelm a smaller frame. The hat on the right reminds me of one I have at home (only it has navy trim and fewer flowers) and seems a quintessential Easter bonnet, decorative and floral but not too fanciful.









Nothing is as glamorous as a wide-brim hat. The asymmetrical sweep on the left keeps the face well in view. The quintessential picture hat on the right does so with a pulled-back brim.













The cloche is my favorite hat of all. The navy straw cloche on the left with its petite floral decoration would do very well for Easter. On the right is another classic style, the fedora. Both shapes have a retro charm.










These unusually flat hats are rather fun. On the left is a style that has popped up throughout the twentieth century in fashion plates, but has anyone ever worn won? On the right is its floppy white embroidered cousin, a bridal hat perhaps?











Asymmetrical hats often catch my eye, I suppose I find them interesting without being fussy. On the left a petite bow gives some French school-girl charm. The hat on the right, with its height, embroidery, and dashing feathers, looks like something out of a 1940s Hollywood extravaganza.













I have been secretly rooting for turbans to become fashionable again, even though they haven't been since the 1810s and I'm sure that even then many people found them silly. My desire to have them come back into mainstream circulation stems from how fun it is to put your hair up in a towel when you come out of the shower and, incidentally, by how flattering it looks on round faces like mine. The weight of the towel must pull back your skin a bit, and then all that height detracts from ugly chins. I think to be really flattering they would have to be a rather larger than the kind shown here, so as to take the place of one's normal mass of hair.