Old Hat

With the decline and fall of last year's bouffant hairdo, women suffered a serious loss of stature. They were told by reassuring hairdressers that it was more chic to be close-cropped, and advised by the fashion magazines simply to develop a longer neck to offset the loss in head height. But women, who like old tenements are apt to crumble at the very concept of major renovation, found a more gradual way of making do. Where once there had been hair, let there be hat.

The leghorn was big enough, but it was big the wrong (horizontal) way; theatergoers could still manage to see over it to the stage. Turbans seemed a possibility and remain wildly popular ("Be your own Lawrence of Arabia," said the ads; "you're as sheik as Araby"). But unless supported by stiff netting, which tends to bring on fairly severe migraine, they last on high only a few moments before slumping to head level. Caps and berets were plainly much too small.

That left the bowler--next to the pith helmet, the most unyielding of all the various head coverings man has devised over the centuries to keep water from trickling down his neck when it rains. Currently splayed across the pages of fashion magazines and topping almost every plastic mannequin in department-store windows across the country, bowlers are being sold to real-life women at a furious rate. Most popular in straw, they come in every possible fabric from linen to leopard, can be made to look entirely new by a switch in ribbon color or the substitution of feather for flower. They are firm enough to hold their own high shape, are better even than the bouffant hairdo; nothing, neither wind nor compact car, is likely to flatten them or leave them bedraggled.

Though confusion between the sexes may ensue, it can be resolved easily enough; if he tips it, it's a man.

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