American Thanksgiving is a time for
thanks and hats.
Just go to your local
elementary school this week and you’ll see children decked out in Pilgrim hats,
playing with their fellow Indians in homemade headdresses.
I’ve always been a hat girl,
growing up on Prince Edward Island, Canada, where the
ocean breeze kept a chill in the air.
There, my Scottish grandmother would bundle me in coarse tam o’shanters,
made from scratchy undyed wool. During
my university years in bilingual Ottawa,
I graduated to French berets in jet noir; loden festooned with a raccoon’s tail
(what was I thinking?); creamy cupcake pink.
On bitter days, and there were
many, I’d pull the beret over my brow, slap on a pair of ear muffs, and
ice-skate down the Rideau Canal toward my campus. I’d share the ice with various Members of
Parliament (Parliament Hill was just beyond the university), their long
winterized trench coats parachuting around them, their briefcases somehow not
throwing them off balance. During her
lunch break one senior MP would don a racing suit and make slow, steady strokes
up and down the canal, stopping later at the stands selling deep-fried beaver
tails, a Canadian winter delicacy.
I wore berets throughout my
undergraduate and graduate education, from Ottawa
to the United States. They were functional, fit my large-ish head,
and, I liked to think, marked me as “other” in my new home: a beret was a
subtle symbol of Canadian pride.
But this steady relationship was
rattled when I went to New York City
to visit my husband’s family one Christmas.
After visiting the requisite art galleries, I always ducked into my
favorite store, Bergdorf Goodman, to check out some living art—the impeccably
dressed patrons who glided through the corridors—and, of course, the fantastic
displays of merchandise. Getting
somewhat lost among the mirrored walls on the accessories level, I took a turn
and found myself gazing at a hat: a
Philip Treacy design. To be exact, an asymmetrical
trilby, with navy cotton exterior, pewter satin lining, silver unicorn logo on
the brand, provenance England. I was smitten.
For a Philip Treacy hat n’est pas un chapeau. Rather, it is an idea. Picture Treacy’s former muse Isabella Blow
wearing a large orange acrylic disk that overwhelms her face, a slender wedge
of pie extracted for her mouth and nose, or a model wearing a sculpture—a
representation of a gently askew tophat spelling out h-a-t in lissome,
sky-scraping letters. But this Irish-born, London-bred milliner known as the
mad Hatter for his confections also makes wearable fantasies; hence the—no, my—assymetrical trilby.
Reader, I bought it. What else could I do? And I carried it down Fifth Avenue in its glistening silvery BG
hatbox, feeling, perhaps for the first time, like a lady rather than the
feminist scholar that I am. I, who
critique Sister Carrie’s seduction by the snug little jackets in a Chicago department store,
fell prey to the same siren song. And
like Hortense, in another Dreiser novel, I wanted the hat so badly that my lack
of cash didn’t stop me; whereas Hortense lures her boyfriend into purchasing
her a coat with vague promises of
affection, I used my BG charge card, with half-hearted assurances to
myself that I’d pay if off in no time.
Geography, though, was the wild
card I hadn’t counted on.
Although my
eccentric new navy asymmetrical trilby didn’t stand out on the fashionable
streets of New York, it practically screamed
“Outsider” when I returned to the Midwest
farmland where I then lived and taught college.
In the Midwest, where people pride
themselves on four-post homes, three square meals a day, and unwavering moral
values, asymmetry isn’t exactly a virtue.
Rather, it makes people suspicious of you.
Usually I tend to court my outside
status.
I quite like to be contrary, and
have ever since I was a teenager, when, yearning for the black velvet pants and
pastel pink satin blouse that all my friends had, my chic grandmother returned
from Montreal with forest green velvet trousers and a burgundy satin shirt.
I wasn’t immediately sure about this
combination, but quickly saw how one could work within a fashion concept while
executing your own take on it.
Couldn’t
my asymmetrical trilby coexist with the John Deere farming caps and the German
Baptist bonnets?
After all, I’d worn a
beret for many a year and the Midwest wasn’t
exactly a bastion of French style.
But whereas my beret was looked on
with grudging acceptance, my trilby was more a source of humor.
Noone actually said anything directly, but
locals would talk to my hat instead of my face, colleagues would be overly
smiley when I’d stalk around campus.
I
felt self-conscious and soon found myself wearing my trilby only at home, happy
to catch surprise glimpses of my reflection in the windows as I’d go about my
evening.
And eventually I put it away, nestled
inside its hatbox, which sat at the bottom of my armoire, as I gradually forgot
about it.
Until, that is, last November, when,
in a burst of enthusiasm for cleaning out my closets via eBay, I rediscovered
the box and its contents. I listed the
hat on eBay, enjoyed a mild bidding war, and prepared to ship the trilby and
box to its new owner, known to me only by her excellent feedback rating. But when I received the eBay-generated
message containing the winner’s email and home address, a different kind of
feedback quickly flashed in my mind. For
the new owner of my Philip Treacy trilby was a Famous New York Personality of
TV and Movies, she of the high cheekbones, sassy persona, and megawatt
smile.
A celebrity bought my London-via-Bergdorf’s hat.
A beautiful, edgy New York
celebrity. We must be soul sisters! We could bond over our love of Philip Treacy
hats! She would totally “get” me; we
could chat over email like fashion insiders; we could meet, even, when I returned
to New York
on my twice-yearly pilgrimages! We’d go
hat shopping together and she could show me how she sports my—our—no, her
hat in the city and makes it her own.
Or I could mail her the hat with a
note saying that I hope she wears it in the best of health. Which I did.
Like Chaucer sending his “littel
book” out into the world, I sent my hat back to New York, where it is meant to be, with its citified
asymmetrical attitude. Perhaps it will
go dancing, to a movie premiere, to a little bistro. Perhaps one night it will
even get tipsy (umm—symmetrical). And I
am thankful that it is with its rightful owner, someone who can literally take
the hat out of her closet, who can enjoy it out in public. And I can enjoy it too, from the distance of
my imagination.
It’s not chilly enough here yet for
my beret. But it will be soon.
