accessories
Hats, scarves and shoes–talk about British accents!
NO SPORTING SCENE IN THE world is quite like Royal Ascot. Other race meets may have fine horses, a patrician crowd and even a dollop of royalty. But only Ascot has the hats. Feathered, flowered, conical, lyrical, absurd; every woman wears one to balance her man’s gray topper. Like Ascot, hats are part of a flourishing British institution: accessories. They are a wonder-part skill, part tradition, part sheer enthusiasm and eccentricity.
While hats have nearly vanished from other Western countries, Britons love them. Scarves too. And understand quirky shoes. Fashion historian Colin McDowell on the origins of this ascendancy. He points out that his country’s tradition of fine shoes, as well as tweeds and tailoring, is essentially masculine. By contrast, the soul of French style is feminine. But times are changing. Male roots can be adapted to create female chic. At least three London designers are showing just how far, and how fabulously, the adaptations can gofrom head to neck to toe.
Philip Treacy, a tall, willow-thin young Irishman who moves like a eat, lives in a Belgravia barnyard of feathers-cockerel, Chinese pheasant, ostrich, gooser and turkey. The neighborhood straw, though, is hardly of the barnyard variety. A Treacy hat may be made of the finest straw or of sinamay, a new natural fiber made from the abaca plant that is transparent and nearly weightless, like the skimmers poised for flight in his showroom. “Hats represent the chance to make something of nothing,” he says, but these little nothings are international darlings, topping off weddings and coronations and, among British ladies, anytime a woman wants a “finish.” Treacy, 29, calls a flattering hat “the equivalent of cosmetic surgery.”
Until he was 17, the only headgear with which Treacy had made an acquaintance was the bucket bonnet that parishioners wore to Mass back in Ireland’s County Galway. He picked up an old straw number at a flea market, took it apart and transformed it into a matador’s montero that he still treasures. At London’s Royal College of Art, he found he was a guinea pig; the school wanted to start a millinery course, and young Treacy tested the ground. He has now been in business for himself for six years. His version of Christmas is Royal Ascot week in June. His studio labors like Santa’s workshop of helpers, and then the boss goes to the course, has lunch and a drink or two, surrounded by 100,000 hats. The Queen Mother passes by in her chauffeured golf cart, trailing ostrich feathers. Young Treacy cheers on this institution. Says he: “She’s like Big Ben.” Treacy is well on his way to becoming a kind of institution or icon as well. No other millinery name is so well known or so linked to glamour.
Georgina von Etzdorf, in the course of the ’90s, saw her scarves-deep, rich velvets, chiffon zephyrs of color and light-go from cult status to elite international movement. Yet for all their popularity, there is no characteristic “look,” the equivalent of brazen initials announcing the designer’s creation to a public that deals only in brand names. This textile artist neither follows fashion nor attempts to set the pace, preferring to go her own sweet, individual way. She starts her work with a painting, usually in watercolor, then adapts and transfers it to seductively textured doth. The daughter of an English mother and a Prussian father, she is, at 41, a lifelong artisan of rare skill. Some of her patterns draw on youthful experience, including a brief period as a designer at the famed Nymphenberg porcelain studio in Munich.
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