Why do bad hats make us uncomfortable? Sometimes, it’s because they age the wearer, while we fault other designs for highlighting features best skimmed over (TP-T’s blue torpedo, we’re looking at you). And then there are the millinery styles that we recognise less as hats and more as pretzels, toilet seats, octopuses... you get the idea.
Melinda Wax, a professor of millinery at Parsons in New York, has more academic ways to codify a hat’s ick factor. ‘If you understand design and you understand fashion, hats are really no different,’ Wax told The Cut . ‘[Y]ou never want a hat to overwhelm an outfit. A person's face is the most important thing to look at and any piece of clothing that overwhelms that is making the same mistake that the wrong hat does.’
Wax analysed the hats worn to Zara Phillips and Mike Tindall’s wedding for The Cut. Here are excerpts from her comments on a few of the guests’ selections...
- On Kate Middleton : ‘I think in terms of proportion it’s right for her.... This looks like a potato chip—that’s the only problem.’
- On Sophie, Countess of Wessex: ‘Oh my God. You know, I don't even have to see more pictures of it, I just know that that hat and that outfit look really great together. She must be a really fun-loving person to have all those calligraphic gestures.’
- On Kirsty Gallacher: ‘I just think that it's really boring and dumb-looking. Also the head piece takes away from how pretty her face is. All you do is look up at IT and not look at her.... It's too small, it's got too much shape going on, and that dress is with those fluttery sleeves, it just doesn't go.’
- On Camilla Parker-Bowles : ‘The first thing I thought is, wait, she's not the bride. There's just too much foofiness going on in that headwear for who she is.... I'd like to put it on her and fiddle a bit with her hair, but I guess she is a person who has really committed to her hair style, at her age and the life she leads. She can't do both — she can't do the hat and the hair.’
- On Princess Eugenie : ‘It's kind of big, but I think with everything else she has on she can carry it... I think she looks prettier in this than she did in that little hat at Kate and William's wedding. It's 100 percent better than what she had before.’
- On Chanelle McCoy: ‘It's enormously unfortunate, that piece she has on her head. It's just Las Vegas, serpentine. It's just not attractive to me, but I'm not a big fan of snakes, either, and it's so hard to tell what it looks like, but it's just too costume-y. It looks like it's been covered in sequins or glitter, and the end looks like bones from feathers.... This is also way too far on the side of her head. The shape—let's call it a sausage—it's just unappealing.’
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