Big Hat Week

There was so much attention focused on hats this past week it’s a wonder the Queen’s little dogs weren’t wearing them as they snuffled around the roots of trees.Once, lots of us wore hats and maybe now we will again. When I was nine my best little buddy got forced into an actual fedora every time his mom put him in a suit. He looked like a pint-sized Al Capone.But then hats kind of went out when the Kennedys came to Washington in the early 1960s and by the end of that decade kids were wearing their hair as their hats; heck, wearing their hair as their clothes practically. Then we had the fever-dream of the 70s and suddenly it was 1980 and from across the pond came the first images of that shy milkmaid peeking up at the world under a different hat every day.More than anyone Diana reversed my own stance on hats and I still have the ones I bought back then, including an Indiana-Jones-style felt one I wear to this day, especially when I go to give a talk. A hat like that  gets you past the formalities. People see you in it and think “Oh she doesn’t take herself too seriously because look at that ridiculous lid!” which is what you want: that you not strike them as stuck-up or formidable in any way.This past weekend stayed at Manhattan's Roosevelt Hotel, named for the old Rough Rider who famously told the world he could manage the country or he could manage his daughter Alice but he couldn’t do both. I should have said right away that this is Alice at the top here, Alice Roosevelt Longworth as she became. She was a real character in the nations’ capital, always in a wide-brimmed hat and capable of stunning even a sitting president with her acid tongue as when poor LBJ said on leaning in to greet her, “Mrs. Longworth, I can’t kiss you in that hat!” Said lemony Alice,  “Mr. Johnson, that’s why I wear it!"These days nobody is intimidated by a hat. In fact when you wear one people just call out to you in jaunty fashion - and really, what could be nicer than that in the midst of your tame little day?