In the Observer:

16 October 1932

All A the most attractively wicked w women of history have h had a crown of glory – or infamy – in their locks, beginning b with Adam’s first wife, w Lilith, and going on through th Jezebel, with poor Lady Godiva respectably embedded in their midst to prove the rule.

Hair being thus on the side of the angels – the dark ones – it followed that hats should be invented. To hide it? Possibly. To suggest it, more likely, by showing a little of it, and leaving one to imagine what a lovely sight the whole lot of it must be.

A couple of years ago this suggestion was not made. Every woman wore tiny fitting hats that made one think she must be as bald as a coot. Last year they swung over with the pendulum to the other extreme, and we all wore things like knitted pancakes or flattened skull-caps which adhered to remote spots on the head, apparently by capillary attraction.

This summer brought the boater, which lasted till the holidays. And now we are up against the most serious problem which can face an obedient fashion-led community. What is the herd to do when there are about 19 bell-wethers?

About 99 things. The only point in common is that point which is worn over the right eye. One of the principal features of the autumn hats is a whole range of stick-iton-anyhow shapes which all have something sticking out of them somewhere, at a sharp angle, like a schipperke’s ear.

There is interest in noting the kindness of the brimmed hat to the hair. The brim is about two inches wide, and all sorts of feminine curlicues appear beneath it – waves and ripples and those wee ringlets laid in symmetrical rows which hairdressers think they have just invented; but Roman matrons know differently.

The vogue is for softness, for hair that looks as though the wind could lift it. It is a quaint fact that the ‘windblown’ effect is achieved by the aid of spirit gum and that it would take a cyclone to budge a hair of it.