Flamenco: Fedora in the lead, it's the return of the hat

Fashion Plate By Angela Murrills

Publish Date: April 12, 2007

It's the season of sexy, confident fedoras, hopping from shelves to heads in Edie Orenstein's Granville Island boutique, but even the hat-shy may not be able to resist a try-on. Evaan Kheraj photo.

Hot-pink skinny cardi, black leather skirt, noir lace stockings, flamenco shoes in jet black, and jet lag–Edie Orenstein, just back from Spain, wears them all very well. Oddly, her head is bare– oddly , because for the past 17 years, Edie's Hats, her shop in the Net Loft on Granville Island, has been Vancouver's epicentre of cool headgear. Transitioning from the sunshine outside to the larger store she moved into three years ago is like jump-cutting from a beer commercial to a scene from a novel by Colette. Antique lamps hang from a ceiling draped and swagged with fabric. Crystals twinkle. A huge brown leather armchair and Persian rugs evoke a gentlemen's club atmosphere (in the gentlemen's hat section), while the ambiance toward the rear of the store, where headwear becomes progressively less practical, is undiluted glamour.

In her mind, Orenstein, who is also a flamenco dancer, is still in Spain. Hundreds of photos from her trip will shortly go up on Flickr, along with stories in her next newsletter. (You can sign up for it at www.edieshats.com/ ) What's interesting, she plans to write, is the resurgence of dress hats in more traditional Seville and of street hats in Madrid and Barcelona. She's also fresh enough off the plane to be able to comment on the sartorial differences between Western Canada and Spain. "Here, women are timid," she says. "The Europeans dress . It isn't a strange thing or a special thing; it's life. They don't consider it frivolous. The afternoon comes. They go home, have a siesta, but in the early evening they get dressed, really nicely, and they all go out walking."