Headdresses have been making, well, headline news, thanks in part to one of the UK’s most famous wearers of headpieces, Isabella Blow, whose biopic The Queen of Fashion is due out this year.
Issy, as she was known, saw them as not merely a fashion statement, but as an extension of her identity, famously saying: ‘I don’t use a hat as a prop. I use it as part of me.’
Their renaissance has also been fuelled by Instagram and a flurry of lavish country-house celebrations. At a party at Cornbury Park, Oxfordshire, home of the Howden family, headpieces were as central to the spectacle as the setting itself.
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For the Narnia-themed event, the insurance magnate David Howden wore a spectacular Aslan-inspired lion headdress commissioned from the Canadian costume designer Maryam of Eastern Wind Studio by his wife, Fiona, who has long been a passionate hat collector and wearer of headpieces.
She sees them as ‘an opportunity to dress up as a character and add glamour, fun and theatre to events’. Her hat collection, sourced from street stalls in Venice, Italy, together with commissioned pieces, ‘makes great dressing-up material for my girlfriends and daughters’ — and for Royal Ascot, which David’s company sponsors. Both David and Fiona were in the Royal Procession last year.
Hats and headpieces have long been regarded as little pieces of theatre, as well as signifiers of status in country-house circles. They acted as a kind of visual shorthand, announcing style, self-assurance and, occasionally, the scale of one’s estate.
Margot Asquith, Countess of Oxford and Asquith (1864 – 1945) dressed as an ‘Oriental snake charmer’ for a fancy dress ball at Devonshire House, in 1897.
(Image credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Consider the Devonshire House Ball of 1897, when Louise Cavendish appeared as Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, wearing an emerald, diamond and ruby crown topped with sweeping ostrich plumes, or the Rothschilds’ surrealist ball of 1972, which saw Audrey Hepburn drift beneath an exquisite birdcage-inspired creation.
In many ways, these pieces — designed to dazzle under candlelight and chandeliers — were the architectural counterparts of the country houses themselves: miniature palaces worn aloft.
‘There’s a natural dialogue between the architecture of a country house and the structure of a hat,’ says leading Society milliner Victoria Grant, whose muse is the ‘face of Ascot’, Martha, Lady Sitwell, and who has noticed a pronounced revival in country-house events as ‘theatres for dress,’ as she puts it.
‘Both are designed to be viewed from multiple angles, both balance proportion and drama, and both reward close inspection. Wearing a sculptural hat in a grand architectural setting feels coherent — each enhances the other.’
The renowned milliner and chairman of the British Hat Guild Stephen Jones describes hats as ‘small-scale buildings, engineered to balance, frame and hold drama’. He views hats as ‘a façade and a persona. You do become the headdress you are wearing’. Stephen often refers to the ‘grammar’ of hats: ‘in the language of fashion’, they are ‘the exclamation mark’.
Few people personify this more fully than the Hon Daphne Guinness, granddaughter of Diana Mitford, fashion muse, model and long-time friend of Blow. When Blow’s hats came up for auction in 2010, Daphne bought the entire collection. She views hats as wearable architecture: moving sculptural objects that exist in dialogue with the body, describing them as ‘shield barriers’.
Her hair alone has become a structural object — a headpiece in its most literal sense. Bi-coloured black and platinum, it is swept back into an impressively high beehive form. ‘When I think my hair needs a bit of help,’ she once remarked, ‘I just glue another bit onto my head.’ Flippant as it sounds, it captures her view of hats as art objects.
Blow’s sister-in-law, the fashion designer Selina Blow, also sees headpieces as a shield. ‘I see hats almost in an armorial sense — a safety thing, like a samurai putting on your kit and then putting on your hat.’ When she married, she wore a spectacular gold headpiece by Philip Treacy that looked almost like a coronal shield, underlining the idea that, unlike a dress, a hat must operate as an independent architectural structure. The piece later featured in an exhibition at the V&A Museum in 2015 and she still gives it the odd outing.
Diana, Princess of Wales, wore a dress by Catherine Walker and a flying saucer-style hat designed by Frederick Fox in Italy, in 1985. The milliner also designed a myriad hats for Elizabeth II.
(Image credit: Anwar Hussein/Getty Images)
The architecture and social structure of hats may long have been synonymous with the country house, but they also create a code that resonated deeply with Elizabeth II. This became the subject of a play by the author and playwright Daisy Goodwin. By Royal Appointment hinged on two of the late Queen’s designers: the very British Hardy Amies (for clothes) and the Australian-born Frederick Fox (for hats), both of whom argued each element of her outfit mattered most.
Between them, they created a balance, but hats, at least publicly, won. For the Queen, hats were her status symbol, her message to the nation, her tool of non-verbal diplomacy. Hats were her most public symbol, akin to the crown itself. As Daisy wrote, ‘even a simple hat was a tool of public display and theatre’. She could convey a message more effectively in a hat than with words, which goes back to Stephen’s message that hats have a grammar of their own.
You win some, you lose some: ‘Caesar and Cleopatra’ failed to earn back its colossal budget, but John Bryan was nominated for an Oscar for Best Art Direction.
(Image credit: Alamy)
One of the greatest theatrical headpiece designers was Oliver Messel, who created some of the most superbly architectural visions of fantasy for stage and film and is the subject of a new book, Oliver Messel: In the Theatre of Design, by his nephew Thomas Messel.
He describes his uncle as a ‘master of illusion… when used on stage, he was acutely aware that it was not close detail, but the effect seen by the audience from a distance that yielded the true impact’. Thus, the crown Messel designed for Vivien Leigh when she played Titania in the 1937 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at The Old Vic, may have looked appropriately regal from the stalls, but ‘when viewed closely, you can see it is made of things like ribbon, silver paper, silk, beads and Scotch tape, all held together on a thin wire frame,’ explains Thomas. ‘The effect was scintillating.’
Similarly, her headdress in the 1945 film Caesar and Cleopatra was made to look convincing enough to transform her into the Queen of Egypt, yet was constructed from anything he could grab to hand, including old sweet papers. ‘Imagine the effect of this in glorious Technicolor upon British morale after four grim years of war.’
Curiously, Society milliner Nicola de Selincourt attributes the present appetite for theatricality at country-house events to another period of deprivation: covid. ‘During lockdown, there was nothing. Perhaps we are seeing a kick-back, a revival of dressing up,’ she says, citing, too, the influence of television series such as Peaky Blinders and Downton Abbey, which ‘remind us how well everyone used to dress’.
What has changed, Stephen observes, is that hats have become ‘a marker of time, place and personality,’ adding that ‘their main purpose has become to be photographed in rather than worn. Within our era, this is genuinely new’.
Victoria agrees: ‘Social media has changed hat-wearing profoundly. People are more visually literate now and more confident about making a statement. We’re seeing a shift away from minimalism towards a more maximalist, expressive approach to dressing, especially for occasions.’
Instagram is awash with spectacular hat wearers and designs — even Christmas-cracker crowns. Last Christmas, the garden designer and writer Isabel Bannerman and her husband, Julian, found themselves wearing an oak-leaf crown and ship designed by The Shop Floor Project, spotted by their son on Instagram.
‘We do like crowns and hats, wreaths and anything to do with oak leaves and trees,’ she says, ‘and they always look good on a bust’ — where the oak-leaf crown now remains.
Fiona’s eldest daughter, Talitha, a fashion stylist, sees social media as part of a broader shift. ‘People are trying to build more personal, evolving styles, and that definitely includes headpieces.’
Whatever the reason, there is no doubt that hats are, to borrow the great costume designer Edith Head’s phrase, ‘the first thing noticed and the last thing remembered’. After all, no one will ever forget Isabella Blow and her hats — not least thanks to her forthcoming biopic.
This feature originally appeared in the April 29, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.’
