palabras ANNSLEY CHAPMAN

Full disclosure: I am, generally, an adamant abstainer of accessories, and therefore an unqualified advisor on the subject matter of all things sartorially superfluous. This is one part because I’m cheap, one part because I’m lazy, and one part because I am truly a contrarian human being. I hate owning more than one purse because I never remember to transition all my necessities into my tote du jour and will inevitably get all the way to work without my cell phone. Jewelry-shopping bores me to tears, leggings belong to the bailiwick of the Lohan family, and the Carrie Bradshaw-sanctioned obsession with shoes sends me into a foaming Marxist rage.

But this season’s resurgence of hats has me all a-twitter, mainly because hats strike me as the most look-altering weapon in a woman’s wardrobe. Summer hats fell out of favor around the time tanning spread like, ahem, wildfire among young women in the 1950s, and girls no longer sought out the skin-preserving shade of a wide brim. Now that crisping our skin into leathery terrains for skin disease has dwindled out of style, the popularity of sun-blocking headgear makes sense. Also, hats are rad. Here are 4 examples reasons why.

1. The Wide-Brimmed Straw Hat

The perfect headgear for keeping it classy while you get tanked on mint juleps, this floppy number also shields your face and shoulders from the glare of a high noon sun. Jessica Simpson rocked this hat at the Derby this year, proving that Southern girls know how to cool off in style. The ribbon wrapped around the crown also provides a useful place to keep betting slips. Check out this summer's crop from designer Eugenia Kim at ShopBop.

2. The Fedora

While hipster girls now sport these dapper caps along with men’s vests and trousers, the unnamed girl in the Indochine love story L’Amant by Margeurite Duras is still one of the first females to appropriate this man’s hat as her own. Steer clear of the kind with feathers in the brims—they harken too closely to men in leiderhosen. Urban Outfitters can feed your fedora fix, with a sizeable selection from straw to twill to felt.

3. The Adventurer’s Hat

A second-cousin-removed from the Derby hat, this iteration has a Carmen Sandiego vibe. At first glance I was leery of imitating the rogue criminal of old-school computer games, but my guy friends were adamantly pro-Carmen hat. “Why not?” one of them demanded defensively. “She was totally hot and she taught me every US capitol.”

4. The Royal Family Hat

Fact: crazy, rich, old ladies in funny hats make everyone’s day, blurring the border between funny and frumpy with such senile awesomeness that it makes me yearn for the time when I too can potter around my house, talking to my pet canaries and wiping my ass with $100 bills. This will never happen to me (such is lot of women who date artists!) but maybe it can happen to you when you put on this magic, ugly hat. The more hideous it is, the more likely a crown prince will mistake you for a blueblood and make you his very own Camilla.