Bereft Berets Go Begging

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 18, 2001 | by Andrea Billups

Jazzman Dizzy Gillespie made bebop and berets cool, but the Pentagon has had less success with headgear. Just how does the Defense Department propose to unload its surplus chapeaus?

Pop music funkster Prince immortalized a raspberry one. Presidential paramour Monica Lewinsky made a black one lewdly political. But now, 618,000 berets face an uncertain future at the Pentagon, where the military agency is up to its hush-hush head in a millinery mishap of epic proportions.

The Pentagon has ordered that no American soldier will wear a Chinese-made beret, and it canceled contracts it had for the headwear with manufacturers in three other foreign countries. Now the Defense Department is looking for the most profitable way to dispense of the $4 million worth of unusable goods. Some could get sold to military-surplus stores, but there are other fashionably civilian options.

In New York City's Soho area, ground zero for all things au courant, Alison Collins, a saleswoman at the Hat Shop, assures berets still are fashionable. "I don't think the beret ever really went out," she says of the quintessentially hip headgear. Last winter, berets were "big, big sellers" at her store, where they went for $20 in felt or $98 for a hand-blocked model. While black is the standard color, camel and charcoal are most popular.

"They are just easy to wear," Collins says. "They dress people up. They are warm." Not only are they functional, but berets also have earned a solid place in fashion history. Little girls donned them in the 1940s. Faye Dunaway sported one in the classic 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. Even the Material Girl herself, Madonna, donned a beret for her "Borderline" music video, a decade before the beret-wearing Lewinsky sidled up to a presidential receiving line to greet her Oval Office flame. Today, actor Samuel L. Jackson has become the beret's latest proponent, with the film star lending his celebrity to the Kangol Co. by wearing their hats to everything from press junkets to movie premieres. Away from Hollywood, berets are worn by police, airline employees and marching bands and color guards nationwide.

Disgruntled Pentagon purchasing agents should take heart, says Casey Bush, executive director of the Headwear Information Bureau, a New York City organization that provides marketing assistance to milliners. The U.S. millinery market has risen by an estimated 10 to 15 percent a year since the mid-1980s, meaning that hats remain a happening trend. In 2000, retail volume for hat sales hit $962 million -- not including baseball caps.

Young women are responsible for much of the resurgence of hat wearing, Bush says, and many of them are using hats as a way to stand out from the crowd. A beret gives a young woman or man instant eye appeal and pizzazz. "Most everybody can wear a beret," she says. "It goes with most facial shapes. It never goes out of style."

Bush, who has made hats her life's mission, offers some suggestions on what the Pentagon might do with its unwanted berets, not so much to recoup its losses, but to create good will. "I'd give the berets to orphanages, to keep the kids warm" she says. "The Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts might want them, too. And all of the patients out there on Medicaid -- maybe they could use them."