• The details of Fashion's Night Out — aka Anna Wintour's Plan To Save Retail — have been announced. Over 700 stores in all five boroughs will be participating in events that range from sewing circles to cook-ins to rock shows:

• Celebs and designers who will be in attendance at the various festivities include Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, Francisco Costa, Manolo Blahnik, Isaac Mizrahi, Kate Mulleavy, Diane von Furstenberg, Liev Schreiber, Stephanie Seymour, and Anna Wintour herself. Although all the tee shirt customization and free music will be enough to drag us around to at least a few stores come September 10, we're also tremendously excited by the idea of taking salsa lessons taught by Juan Carlos Obando. [WWD]
• As is to be expected, Vogue is apparently attracting a lot of attention from cost-cutting consultants McKinsey. Dare we hope that McKinsey will shake things up at the tired mag, and shake them hard? In other Condé Nast news, Teen Vogue's very stylish accessories editor, Taylor Tomasi Hill, is leaving to take a position at Marie Claire. There are no plans to replace her. [Fashionista]
• Agent Provocateur is launching a new line of super-expensive lingerie it's calling couture. Agent Provocateur Soirée will launch with an in-season show at New York Fashion Week on September 9, and hit stores in November. Prices top £2450. [Elle UK]
• The second issue of Love is out, and it turns out the preview image that surfaced online last month actually is one of the covers — editor Katie Grand chose Alex Hartley, and 18-year-old bass player she found on the Internet, for one cover, and Sting spawn Coco Summer for the other. [Fashionologie]
• Katie Grand had 35 guests at her recent wedding. Thirty-five guests who finished 28 bottles of vodka. Our kid of woman. [ToL]
• Dasha Zhukova, the 28-year-old heiress, art gallerist, and Grand's replacement editor at Pop, is rumored to be pregnant by her 42-year-old boyfriend, Roman Abramovich. [P6]
• An image of Scarlett Johansson which might be part of the ad campaign for a Dolce & Gabbana perfume launching later this year has leaked. The perfume is called Rose The One, and the picture is very soft and rosy looking, plus Johansson is already confirmed to be the face of the scent, both of which are signs that point to yes. [SassyBella]
• Tori Spelling has launched a children's clothing range. Little Maven will cost $26-$88, and is designed for kids up to 4 years of age. [Daily Mail]
• Naomi Campbell and Queen Rania of Jordan were introduced while holidaying in the south of France. There's no word on what they discussed upon meeting. [Daily Mail]
• The mayor of Kennesaw, Georgia, which is male model Sean O'Pry's hometown, is today giving the 20-year-old an official proclamation, because O'Pry speaks highly of Kennesaw in the interviews he does between gigs for Armani and Calvin Klein. [P6]
• Comme des Garçons and Converse are giving their collaboration wider distribution this fall. Four styles of the Comme des Garçons-designed sneakers will go on sale in select cities at the end of this month, and worldwide in October, for $100 a pop. [WWD]
• When asked about the person who irrevocably changed the way she looked at fashion, Heidi Klum generously named Karl Lagerfeld, despite the designer's stated dislike of her. [Newsweek]
• Everybody is wearing Lolita glasses. And by everybody, we mean Madonna, Drew Barrymore, Katy Perry, Nicole Richie, Kelly Osbourne, and Kim Kardashian. Clearly we ought to be wearing them, too. Or something. [NYDN]
• If you are a man who wants to buy Levi's jeans that are "re-created using the original techniques from 1873" for $395, you can do so, at J. Crew's downtown men's stores. [WWD]
• Riam Dean, the young woman who was asked to work in the stockroom by Abercrombie & Fitch because of her prosthetic arm, has sold the full, terrible story of her experience of discrimination to the Daily Mail. Dean says the £9,000 she won from the company in damages hasn't covered her legal fees. [Daily Mail]
• Hats are back, again. This story gets re-written every six months. [WSJ]
• The alligator "harvest" begins later on this month in Florida, but wildlife experts expect the number of the creatures that will end up as purses this year to be drastically reduced: while revenue from alligator skins topped $71 million in Florida in 2007, a mere $10 million is this year's industry estimate. What doesn't make sense about all these stories about exotic skins, whether alligator, crocodile, or python, losing their marketplace appeal, is the fact that among luxury categories, the bridge products — wallets, keychains, and other "aspirational" branded baubles — are the ones that are experiencing the steepest decline in sales. Brands from Hermès to Louis Vuitton have reported that their most expensive offerings, like exotic skinned bags, are still experiencing strong sales — if not actually leading sales across the whole brand. So what gives? Are the pythons and gators going to be left to their own devices in the Everglades this season, or not? [MSNBC]
• H&M's same-store sales fell 3% on last year during the month of July; analysts had expected a more modest 1% drop, since the fast fashion chain has been performing relatively well in the recession so far. [Reuters]
• Following another disastrous quarterly result, Abercrombie has announced it plans to further cut its prices. [WSJ]
• Escada USA filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in New York, one day after the German parent company opened bankruptcy proceedings there. [WWD]

Jones got his start in hat making simultaneously in two very different venues: at the venerable English couture house Lachasse, where he trained while studying at Central St. Martins, and in his flat, where he'd fashion creations for the New Romantic London club kids of the late 70s. His work shows the mark of that very wide set of influences. Jones is responsible for everything from the headwear that marches down the runway at all of Dior's couture shows to the human-hair caps from Nicolas Ghesquière's first season at Balenciaga. His designs vary from Surrealist-inflected doll-part deconstructions (the "Myra", from Jones' Fall/Winter 03 collection, shown below) to showgirl showpieces (see Kylie Minogue's last tour) to things made out of popsicle sticks: if you buy Jones' millinery-as-escape-of-self bit, you might say his work contains multitudes of people you can be. (Perhaps "people" is too generic — characters, then, for sure.)

Solve Sundsbo shot this story, for Another Magazine, and it's beautiful. (It is also available for free online.) The directional lighting, the clinical atmosphere, the cool, desaturated tones, the lines of Guinevere Van Seenus's barely made-up face are all so perfect. (And that's saying something, given I normally can't even stand to look at Van Seenus, a Steven Meisel favorite who once told The Face that the Holocaust could be interpreted as karmic retribution for something really bad the Jews must have done.)

Hats are costume, no matter how many times that trend piece gets written. But they aren't any more costume-y than most of the other looks in fashion magazines; many of us would no sooner wear a felt galleon perched atop our heads than we would a pair of Balenciaga armored leggings or a deconstructed Comme des Garçons cape (Rei Kawakubo is another designer for whom Jones frequently works). I manage to keep a hat or two in my suitcase, and whenever I put them on, they change the tenor of any outfit — definitely moreso than any other accessory — precisely because of this touch of the pure editorial sublime they provide. Once I walked into a designer's showroom wearing a floppy 60s-style hat with an extravagant brim and a scarf for a band, and she booked me on the spot. It was definitely because of the hat.

Continued Jones, to Another Magazine's Susannah Frankel, "Especially if people are coming to me, they're looking for a costume, a way into becoming someone else. Whether you're becoming a lady going to Ascot, or you've got a soft felt on and you're becoming Garbo, or you're putting on a baseball cap and you're becoming 50 Cent but really you're a nice boy from Winchester. The self-expression for the milliner is about creating something that is dynamic and can be an expression of themselves. For the person wearing the hat, it's about expression too, not necessarily of yourself, but of another self."

You could say that's the project of fashion in general — the expression of another self.

"Hats: An Anthology," the show co-curated by Stephen Jones and Oriole Cullen, closes at the Victoria and Albert museum on May 31.

Stephen Jones [Another Magazine]
Hats: An Antholoy [Victoria and Albert Museum]

The Good:
Laura Gleich's Funny Face special is the epitome of 50s loveliness.


Kate Waterhouse's retro-modern Ascot Gavotte is a perfect meld of shapes.


Stripe + pearls + chapeau + flowing red locks = chic eccentric, as modeled by Donna Stevens.


The Bad:
As Kelly Smythe shows, leather corsets almost never enhance an outfit. And when they do, it's not at the track.


There is one thing I object to about Laura Dundovic's outfit and you can probably guess it's "her shoes."


What Say You?


When it comes to Sandra Sully: one element too many, or eccent-chic?


Bizarrely fab, or fabulously bizarre?

[Images via Getty]

Full disclosure: I'm a total hat-sporter. And, um, some of my best friends are milliners. Tams, cloches, cocktail hats, even the occasional oversized fedora. But then, I am a well-known ass. And even when I'm wearing an especially good one, I know it's never something one can take for granted - you're always aware that you're wearing a little bit of a costume, and while this has its charms, it's by no means always desirable. One simply cannot pretend a be-plumed tilter provides much warmth; and it's not as if it's a societal necessity. If we stick to the maxim that the further something strays from its intended purpose, the closer it approaches decadence, then hats are the very definition of luxury.

Within this, of course, there are different school of hat-wearers. As Jessica put it, "If I see a church lady wearing a bold hat, I'm like yeah, that's not affected; but when I see a hipster wearing a bowler it pains my soul." No one objects to someone wearing a hat as a holdover from another time or as a cultural mandate; the issue is more when, as in all such things, people take a little bit of this for their own ends, strip it of significance, and look silly. Take Kenley's retro chapeaux on the Project runway : they may have worked for her, but they were anything but effortless. Isabella Blow didn't sport her Philip Treacys to blend in. Says a milliner in the Times, “You almost have to have a relationship with it, but not in a precious way. You have to wear it with a certain carelessness." Well, easier said than done.

The piece raves about "theatrical Alpine hats" and a "rugged Western hat" that "assumes a kind of elegance with an antiqued ribbon wrapped around the crown" and, I'm sorry, but however cool these might be as works of art, most people wearing them are obviously going to look goofy. The thing about these optimistic trends is that it seems like they're founded in a subconscious wish for the strictures of a time when sartorial rules prevailed. As such, they're always going to be essentially inauthentic. Wear them, sure, but know it's out of a deliberate sense of fantasy — and don't expect the trend to take off any time soon. That said, there's something cool about the idea of a new presidency bringing the hat back after JFK killed it — but that, again, is my being nostalgic.

The Way You Wear Your Hat [New York Times]