Style Bites – Hats

Welcome to ‚Style Bites‘. I am Julia – Trend Researcher and Style Analyst – and this is my very first post for ‚Styleclicker‘. From now on you will get a new ‚Style Bite‘ every first Monday of the month. A ‚Style Bite‘ is not about what’s hot and what’s not and it’s not meant to be a style manual for you to follow, but I hope it can give you inspiration for your own personal style (if you want more personal style visit my blog www.apersonalstyle.com). Each ‚Style Bite‘ will be about a certain style-detail or -item and this first one will be about hats.

Hats are currently in fashion. That sounds wrong. A hat should never become ‚trendy‘, it should just be a regular piece of clothing, a good way to complete your look, just like a handbag or gloves. That’s why this very first ‚Style Bite‘ that I am about to feed you is dedicated to the hat-lovers of this world (I hope it goes down smoothly).

I am not about to tell you how they used to wear them back in the old days, I just want to make you realize how practical and fabulous at the same time a hat can be. A hat can make you appear taller than you are, lets you forget about hair loss and protects you from the weather. You can even get away with unwashed hair when you wear a hat. That’s the practical part. The fabulous part is that a hat can enhance the look you are wearing, it will always be the extra cherry on the cake and it can even create a certain ‚aura‘ around you.

The choice of a floppy hat gives this ‚hippy – artsy‘ outfit an almost mysterious and very sophisticated look and makes the girl appear taller and more imposing. This kind of hat goes very well with a long sleek silhouette and can be worn quite casually with denim or floaty long skirts or more dramatic if you add extra volume like the girl in the picture.

This hat style is very simple to do as you can take every old knitted hat and roll it up. What makes this look so stunning though is the contrast between the sailor-like, nautical and quite masculine element of the hat (think J. Nicholson in ‚One flew over the cuckoo’s nest‘) and the almost feminine feel of the transparent, layered shirt, his brooch and the skinny belt.

Imagine this girl without her hat – ‚cool-and-sexy-school-teacher‘-look, completed by the heavy frame of her glasses and granny shoes – not too bad. The hat makes the difference though. Like a little girl’s hat, almost harlequinesque, worn at the very back of her head it adds this certain kind of innocence and playfulness that makes her look so extraordinary.