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Hats are not something you simply plop on your head. Hats are marquees — they announce who you are. They cap your story with an exclamation mark.
How fitting, then, that Carrie Bradshaw — the hat-crazy writer played by Sarah Jessica Parker on Sex and the City and the And Just Like That spin-off — chose a raspberry beret to top off her final outfit.
Well, maybe it wasn’t exactly a beret. Like my own favorite hat, which I fell in love with in Paris many years ago, Parker’s topper in the series finale of And Just Like That defies simple definition. It looked like a pink velvet brioche tied onto her head with a ribbon — but it was beret-like enough to keep me humming Prince’s “Raspberry Beret.”
We last see Carrie Bradshaw on Thanksgiving Day, and she’s dressed head to toe in berry tones — from her sequin top to her full crinoline skirt, an homage to the tutu Carrie wears in the first episode of Sex and the City. On the side of her head is the hat — the kind you find in a second-hand store.
“That jaunty little velvet-pink chapeau? It was a vintage style that has been in the AJLT wardrobe for years, just waiting for its moment,” costume designer Molly Rogers told Vogue. “Of course, we had to put a hat on.”
Of course. Some heads are destined to be crowned.
Think of … Charlie Chaplin’s bowler, Indiana Jones’ fedora, Coco Chanel’s boater, Jackie Kennedy’s pillbox, Abraham Lincoln’s top hat, Josephine Baker’s headdresses, Beyoncé’s oversized “Cowboy Carter” hat. And so on.
A hat is like a luggage sticker or a passport stamp: it shows where you’ve been.
My favorite hat came from a tiny, crowded chapeau shop in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, the artsy slice of the city where I have lived since I first came to the City of Light on my 25th birthday.
My Paris hat is me: put together but imperfect, hand-stitched and scrunched, shaped like a bell — a “cloche,” as the French say — with a brim large enough to shade my face and fabric as soft as a bonnet.
It is stitched together with three linen colors — beige, tan and mauve — and features a floppy flower on the side made of 20 fabric petals, their edges frayed.
I picked it out of a big pile of hats in La Boutique à Chapeaux on Rue des Saints-Pères, a Left Bank street that dates back to the Middle Ages and has been part of my life since childhood.
When I was in my late 20s, I covered the ready-to-wear collections in Paris for The Denver Post, and I always stayed in the 6th, near Rue des Saints-Pères. This was because it was just across the Seine River from the Louvre. The fashion shows were then held in tents in the Tuileries Garden next to the Louvre, so I could easily walk from my cozy, quirky, affordable hotel, the Hôtel de l'Université, across the river to the Right Bank, where the fancy people stayed.
The tents were packed with chic fashionistas wearing trench coats, smoking cigarettes and shouting “asseyez-vous!” to anyone blocking their view. The only person I remember wearing anything on top of her head was Suzy Menkes, famed fashion editor of the International Herald Tribune, who is now 81 and still wears a pompadour poof in her brunette hair.
Suzy scared me then, but now that I’m 69, I applaud her poof. I also appreciate a fraying flower. So when I placed my Paris hat on my head, I knew it would come home with me.
I understood what writer Lyn Slater meant when she wrote, “A few years ago, I let a hat into my life.”
Slater, a former college professor, became well-known for her style and her Instagram, “The Accidental Icon.” When she was tired of all that fashion attention, she and her husband moved to an old Victorian home, and Slater wrote a book, How to Be Old. She also writes a Substack column, “Dispatches from the Shed.”
Last year, she wrote a piece called “The Hat: Genesis of a Character.” She met her hat in Amsterdam, when a walk in search of a cafe led her to a hat shop instead.
“What made this hat uniquely mine was the wild and unruly veil that fell from under the brim of the skippers’ cap,” she writes. “It was so intensely feminine. A Dutch boy became a Dutch girl. The veil offers me the privacy and mystery that has always been so important to me, despite my paradoxical public performance. Better than sunglasses, it allows me to show off the blue of my eyes and accentuate the redness of my lips. I am both accessible and inaccessible at the same time. And just like magic, my hat has become imbued with all kinds of stories.”
And just like that … an enchanting character is born from a hat!
Sarah Jessica Parker calls hats “the punctuation point” on an outfit. Her most controversial topper was a huge, cloud-like gingham hat that viewers referred to as her “Strawberry Shortcake” hat. That pillowcase-like hat costs $511 in real life and requires a courageous character to emerge from under the cartoonish style.
Stevie Nicks paid just a few bucks for her signature top hat — which she found in a second-hand store in Buffalo, New York, while thrifting with Christine McVie decades ago. She used to wear it when Fleetwood Mac performed “Go Your Own Way.”
Hats “zing up” your look, Nicks’ stylist Margi Kent told me. They make it hard for a woman to be ignored.
Whichever way you go, go with a chapeau.
Do any of you ever wear a hat? When and what kind? Let us know in the comments below.
