Welcome to my first posting! As part of the buying team at Edie Hats, I will be giving you a behind the scenes look at how we choose our fabulous selection of hats and accessories for our store on Granville Island.
For those of you who have yet to visit us, Edie Hats has been in business for nearly thirty years, and has been a major player in Vancouver’s fashion scene. We have our hats featured consistently in many newspapers, magazines, films, blogs, fashion shows, and designers’ look books. Most recently, I modeled some various hats for our local Ming Pao newspaper.
In addition to our status as a retail attraction in the Lower Mainland, we also host events. As you can assume, this is no typical venue. The store must be completely cleared of any merchandise in order to house the audience and performers. The intimate quarters prove the experience to be quite interactive, with audience members little more than a foot away from the performers. In June 2007, we hosted part of the “Café de Chinitas” series by the Al Mozaico Flamenco Dance Company, in collaboration with the Orchid Ensemble. Flamenco is very much part of the story of Edie Hats, with the featuring of handmade shoes (for both dance and street wear) and embroidered shawls and fringed picos in our many displays.
Performance, itself, is part of the Edie Hats story. While some may take this in a literal context (since we host events) and because the store is built on a sprung dance floor, I happen to see this connection from a different perspective.
In university, I studied the History of Art and I wrote an essay on Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills. In this series of photographs, she uses set, stance, and dress to convey the plots and characters of films without explicitly referencing names. In reading about Sherman, I read stories of her showing up at parties dressed in costumes, vintage clothing from an era before, proving her use of clothing to modify her identity. Clothing, we know as an indicator of identity. In this sense, I recognized how dressing is performing; we convey ideas far beyond what may actually be intended, and we can consciously choose to manipulate this. In Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, we assume the characters of a starlet in the denouement of a plot; in private, she continued this performance.
For hats, putting one on your head can call to mind our shared and our personal experience. On a constant basis, we can see our customers put on a fedora or a cloche, and recall the hats that our fathers and mothers, our grandfathers and grandmothers wore. They assume our own personal histories, and in re-telling these narratives through dress, putting on a hat is a performance.
Tags: Art, Dance, Fashion, Flamenco, Hats, Vancouver
