Book review: Hats by Yona Lesger

Absolutely love this new book about hats by Yona Lesger. I’ve found myself in several conversations lately that all began with someone lamenting that “people don’t wear hats anymore,” and this book makes it clear that people have very specific types of hats they’re talking about when they assert something like this. 

It is divided into sections based on types of hats and on the circumstances for which they are worn—practical hats, symbolic hats, aesthetic hats, and transformative hats.

No one would claim that, say, bishops and rabbis and popes don’t wear hats anymore—religious headwear is in the “symbolic hats” category. Similarly, no one would say that firefighters or farmhands or baseball players don’t wear hats anymore (practical hats), or that people attending a Royal wedding or a thoroughbred horserace don’t wear hats anymore (aesthetic hats).

I’m excited to share this book with my students and discuss all the occasions, places and reasons hats *are* very much still a big part of dress and adornment, and why there’s a kind of willful blindness to all these hats people wear.

The book is packed with full-color photographs of different types of headwear that exemplify the kind of hats she’s covering.

Highly recommend, particularly for those seeking millinery design inspiration.