Hats!
by Margaret Maron
As the royal wedding approaches, we've been barraged with pictures of the upper British class cavorting around the countryside. I will be in DC for Malice Domestic Friday morning and if someone turns on the television at five a.m., I shall definitely adjust my pillows and watch. While I wish the young couple all the happiness in the world, I will not be focusing on them so much as on the headgear worn by their guests.
Honestly now: have you ever seen such? Some of these feathery "fascinators" would be dangerous to wear during bird-hunting season.
I love the idea of hats—real hats, not baseball caps, knit ski helmets, or sun visors—but I never wear them except when working outside in the summer. My garden hat is not a pastel vision adorned with ribbons and flowers such as Larry Block wore at Malice several years ago, but rather a plain, wide-brimmed straw designed to keep the sun off my face, neck and ears. The last time I wore a hat in public was two years ago when someone clapped a squishy velvet tam on my head shortly before they gave me an honorary degree. They asked for it back immediately after the ceremony, too. My last Sunday-go-to-meeting hat was probably back in the Eisenhower era. Indeed, Eisenhower was our last president to regularly wear a hat.
Men and boys alike used to wear felt fedoras and trilbies or straw boaters every time they stepped outside. Roosevelt wore them, Truman wore them, Ike wore them; but John F. Kennedy went mostly bare-headed after his inauguration and a nation of men, seeing how young and handsome he looked, immediately threw their fedoras in the trash. Jackie's iconic pillbox kept dressy hats on 
female heads for another four or five years, but after that,the women's hat industry would have died a quick death had it not been for black women who still won't go to church without a beautiful hat on their heads.
Aretha Franklin's hat was not an anomaly. Not here in the south, anyhow.
My New York mother-in-law loved hats and had a nice selection of seasonal pastel and floral concoctions similar to those worn by Queen Elizabeth and Lady Camilla. She never went to mass bareheaded or with only a head scarf, and her hat boxes took up two full shelves in her closet.
Country and western singers started wearing Stetsons on stage about the time other men were giving them up, and Wyoming mystery writer C.J. Box wears his cowboy hat everywhere even though I don't think he sings. He may be part of a resurgence though, because after a long hiatus, men's hats seem to be coming back. Is it the Indiana Jones influence or that TV show Mad Men? 
What about you? Are hats part of your normal wardrobe or will you be joining me Friday morning to snicker at (yet half envy) the hats we'll be seeing?
