Her chamomile-petal crown adorning her head like a rhinestone-studded halo, Henrietta Swan-Price looks like a hatted angel.
Or, at the very least, like an evangelist, because Swan-Price is spreading the gospel of hat-wearing.
"If you want to look nice and feel good about yourself, you should wear a hat - you don't have to buy a new outfit," she declares. Swan-Price is a Seattle milliner who is in town for the musical Crowns, which runs through July 3 at the Prince Music Theater.
Swan-Price, owner of Henrietta's Brimming With Elegance Hats, provided most of the 120 headpieces that serve as the play's props and scenery. Resplendent from head to toe in lollipop pink - pink suit, pink shoes, pink pocketbook and pink crown - she is head-turning proof of the power of a woman in a hat.
The habit of African American women wearing hats as a form of self-expression is almost as old as the black church itself.
Hats have been around for centuries. In the hat's modern heyday, the hat shop was as important to fashionable women as the shoe store is today. Few women would be caught dead in public without their requisite hat and gloves.
By the 1960s, wigs, hairdressers and informality usurped the hat's appeal. Hair was teased and back-combed into designs that rivaled the most elaborate headgear. Who needed a wide brim when you could sport a huge Afro?
But churchgoing black women of a certain age never stopped wearing hats. And with the emergence of innovative milliners such as Tim Crawford, owner of T Crawford's Fine Millinery on Fourth Street, hats are poised for a comeback - or so hat-people predict.
"Millinery will never die if you have a spirited designer," says Crawford, who creates showy headpieces to be worn on fashion runways as well as in church pews. Speaking of black churchwomen, his most loyal clientele, he adds: "We will always go to church, and we will always praise God. My ladies will spend their last dime to look good."
Crowns, the gospel-infused musical written by actress and playwright Regina Taylor and adapted from the picture book Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats, by Michael Cunningham and Craig Marberry, brings this phenomenon to life through dance, song and words. Taylor crafted Crowns' dialogue by taking snippets of interviews from the book. The women's oral histories explain how hat-wearing merges faith and fashion:
I think adorning the head is a retention of African tradition. . . . Hats are a part of us.
