Ascot Hats and Oscar Dresses

From facebook:

Patrick has been reading articles and letters in The Guardian about Ascot. I got curious and looked at some of the hats. They are quite amazing and (I thought) quite awful. I then looked at Kentucky Derby hats -- also quite awful, but not in the same class. That led to the website of noted British milliner Philip Treacy. The best of his hats (I looked at a bunch) look like abstract sculture. I'm not sure they work atop human heads, but they'd look fine if you made them ten feet tall and hung them from a museum ceiling. My personal favoritie might be a row of brillo boxes that rise like a plume from the head. Treacy is a Warhol fan.

I decided the equivalent fashion event in the US is the Oscars, so I went and looked at Oscar dresses. They are not close to the Ascot hats, though I do have fond memories of Bjork's dead swan Oscar dress.

The thing I was struck by after looking at a bunch of Oscar dresses is how unmemorable -- and boring - almost all are. They also look uncomfortable and unmanageable. Why the heck does anyone want to drag a train around? All that work for something that is boring. The dead swan dress was not boring.

A friend mentioned the Oscar dress made of credit cards, which I had missed. I found it, thanks to a good search engine, and it's quite wonderful, made of linked gold American Express cards. Completely memorable. Not boring. So that is two dresses out of many that I will remember.

I suppose I could try to say something profound about Ascot hats and Oscar dresses, but I won't. A dead swan and credit cards say as much as needs to be said.