The Style Maven: summer hats

I like to think I'm not a fashion victim, but I am a victim of something. Take last week, for example, when I was breakfasting at King's Cross St Pancras prior to boarding the Eurostar to Paris. Once I'd spotted my companion traveller, the French mother of a teenage girl, my only thought was how I was going to replicate her look before getting on the train in less than an hour. I didn't even see her face because I was sitting behind her, but her black jacket, her wide-legged jeans and her loose knot of hair poking out from under - and this is the killer detail - a battered white panama hat were enough. Who needs a face when they look so good from behind?

Anyway, I happened to be wearing a black jacket, I was in jeans and I always have a scruffy ponytail, so that would all do… but The Killer Detail? Absent. Now I saw how imperative it was. Boarding the Eurostar (to Paris!) without a panama? Unthinkable. Inès de la Fressange would never do such a thing. It was 8am. The chance of getting to Lock & Co in St James's was nil (NB: there's something about Eurostar that makes one think one is entitled to a vast deal more champagne and shopping in St James's than one's life is currently providing), so all I could do was tear down the shopping mall in the station, hoping for the best.

I have to say that, out of the many occasions when Accessorize has rescued me (umbrellas, socks, tights, hair bands), I have never appreciated it more than in that slow-motion moment when I spotted three pale trilby-ish straw hats floating over a sea of spangled clutch bags. It was the work of a moment to swipe my card and get one of them on my head - cream, dusky-pink band - at a jaunty angle. The relief! Now I was dressed. I didn't care that it only cost £15, I didn't care that it was made of paper and not going to last the summer. It was The Look. I floated through passport control, a young Frenchwoman in a big cardigan sobbing beautifully beside me, and all seemed right with the world once more.

Also Read: homecoming dresses

Also Read: http://www.graziadress.com/cute-homecoming-dresses