Actually, I thought the pink so called hat looked somewhat like a beribboned toilet seat set on end, and couldn’t understand what the point of it was!
When I was still performing I had to wear some pretty wild get-ups on my head, and they were made of some pretty strange materials. Plywood, in a couple of cases. A slew of different tiaras. Swan headdresses. None of them were comfortable. Try jumping, spinning, and dancing on your toes with something like that fastened to your head with about a zillion hairpins. Oh, and don’t forget to smile while you’re doing it!
Maybe twenty-two years in professional ballet accounts for my antipathy for headgear.
If I’m going to wear something on my head at church, it had better be comfortable! Even the “church hats” I see on some millinery sites look pretty difficult to wear. Ribbons, feathers, flowers, and all sorts of frou-frou. Something that looked like an academic mortarboard piled high with fruit salad. Something else that looked like a Hula hoop covered with straw and perched on someone’s head. Another Hula hoop covered with more feathers than I ever saw in “Swan Lake!” Talk about dashing into Mass trailing your frou-frou stuff up the aisle!
Then there’s the problem of real weather, a real consideration in the Northeast. It rains here, a lot. It gets windy when it isn’t raining. You get to carry your hat into church in these circumstances, or chase it through the parking lot, or wear those elegant rain bonnets over it (if you can still find them, they’re as rare as, well, lace mantillas!) So now here you are, carrying your sodden straw hat which has given up the ghost into church after retrieving it from nearly blowing under a Buick, and cramming it on your head, desperately trying to bend it back into shape and enduring the wet chill on your scalp.
A lot of the hats you see are way too formal to be worn with business-type clothing. Plus, I go to church to put myself in the presence of the Lord, not to sit there and fool with some stupid tschotsky on my head that refuses to stay in place! Talk about distracting!
Check out the website for something called physician endorsed hats, they are sun hats and many of them would be quite adaptable for wearing with “business casual” wear, which I think describes most of the fashions you see in church nowadays. Whether we like it or not, most people just don’t dress as formally as was done in the 1950’s. If you’re going to go the hat route, make sure the level of formality matches the rest of your outfit.
Maybe that is the one real practical beauty of a lace mantilla or chapel veil. They aren’t used as a fashion accessory (unless you are a flamenco dancer.) They’re unipurpose. They look equally pretty, or strange, depending on your point of view, with anything you wear, and there’s no question you’re wearing them to Mass!
and possibly awkward questions, yes.
