THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, May 8, 1995 TAG: 9505060046
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Larry Maddry
LENGTH: Medium: 89 lines
It is a dream world of women's hats, a shop that seems lost in time and space, a quiet refuge of mirrors and wooden blocks shaped like heads. It is a world belonging to a gentler time when ladies wore kid gloves to the elbows and twirled parasols at teas.
Welcome to the Blue Bonnet, a Norfolk millinery shop on the second floor above Stark & Legum at 739 Granby St. There's no place like it in Hampton Roads. Odds are its likes cannot be found on this coast outside New York.
It's a shop where hat dreams come true.
Tear out a page from a fashion magazine with a fancy hat on it and bring it to the Blue Bonnet. They can make it for you, so expertly that your version may be better than the original.
They do make originals here. Creations in striking colors that have the look of a master chef's sugary confections.
See them decorating the mannequin heads in front of a long mirror, bubbles and pillboxes, off-the-faces, picture hats, derbies, berets and manipulated hats with raffish bends in their brims.
The hats seem so elegantly out of touch with the times. Women now wear hard hats, ball caps, pilot caps, even combat helmets.
The fancy hat seems an anachronism. I couldn't understand why woman wanted or needed them. Anne Ingram, the smiling, indulgent shop founder, explained.
``Women still want to look beautiful,'' she said. ``And when you are wearing your finest finery, you don't feel complete without the perfect hat.''
Even women who don't wear hats always have two or three, she said. ``There's a hat for everyone. The woman who says `I can't wear a hat,' can . .
Which explains why so many women find their way to the Blue Bonnet, which not only makes hats for men but created the hats for the Williamsburg Fife & Drum Corps and the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey star clown Popovich (who demanded that one of his hats have a wooden brim suitable for juggling). The shop was asked to do the women's hats for the TV miniseries ``A Woman Called Jackie'' and has a regular customer in Hollywood actress June Lockhart.
When I arrived, Elizabeth Teague was sewing on hats for Mother's Day, which, I learned, is an important hat-wearing day for women.
``Why can't a woman simply wear the hat she got for Easter?'' I asked.
Teague, who was wearing jeans and a T-shirt imprinted with a hell-busting motorcycle on the front, nearly fell off her stool, laughing.
``She can't do that!''
``Why not?''
``It isn't fashion,'' she replied. ``A man can wear the same old hat seven days a week, and it doesn't matter. But a woman can't wear the same hat twice. That's just the way it is.''
``Oh.''
Hat making, on the other hand, is just the way it was: a centuries old art that begins with finding a wooden block weighing 3 or 4 pounds roughly shaped like a woman's head.
``The wooden blocks are nearly all made of poplar because the wood seems to breathe,'' Anne Ingram said. There are about 1500 wooden blocks in the shop, some almost a century old. Difficult to find now, they are collector's items worth from $150 to $300 each.
A milliner selects a block that corresponds with the shape of the client's head and begins her work. The hat's fabric, called a body or flair, then must be blocked. The hat's brim is stiffened in a special solution, then cut. Wires are added to the brim and crown, then ornamentation begins.
Sometimes the ornamentation is a bigger project than forming the hat. Teague said her largest and most expensive project to date was a hat made of hundreds of bugle beads that were applied by hand. The hat cost $500 when completed. The shop's prices begin at $79.95.
Ingram learned the art of hat making after opening a Blue Bonnet Shop on Freemason Street in the 1970s. After selling fashionable hats for years, she wanted to learn how to make them but found there were no schools. When in New York making purchases, she asked to see how the hats were made for the big name designers, including Mr. Johns and Frank Olive. ``I took lots and lots of notes and sometimes hid on the fire escapes to escape notice,'' she said.
Ingram, Teague and their business associate, Gail Brand, moved to the Stark & Legum location about two years ago.
Before leaving, they asked my hat preference as I surveyed the high fashion chapeaus on a long line of mannequin heads.
``Have yah got something with Bull Durham on it?'' I asked.
They were fresh out, as suspected. ILLUSTRATION: Staff color photo by Jim Walker
The elegant hats at the Blue Bonnet shop in Norofolk are designed by
Anne Ingram
by CNB