THEY CALL THEM WRAP STARS – WE CALL THEM A HIP ALTERNATIVE TO THE BASEBALL CAP

The way I see it, everyone wants to cover their heads these days. And after donning baseball caps since birth, the young and hip are turning to scarves, head-wraps, headbands and doo-rags to make a fashion statement. Of course it is the anti-fashion statement, but if you remember the 60’s we wore them then too. (I won’t tell if you don’t).

This is what hipsters are saying: “The headscarf is intimate, personal, an accessory you have a relationship with, in the way a woman doesn't even have with a pair of shoes,” says Bali Barret, art director of Hermès' silks, who counts 200 among her personal stash and never leaves home without at least two in her bag. "It's very feminine, textural, carries your fragrance, allows you to wear colors and patterns that you might not dream of wearing in your clothes. Its association with style icons makes it almost mythical."

Let’s face it, fashion or not, Willie Nelson has been wearing a bandana for years and so have rockers and hip hop stars. So it seems only fitting that the fashion house of Hermes would want to hitch up with this trend (scarves are part of their heritage and claim to fame). Hermes has 900 designs created by a team of 40 artists - each prototype requiring nine months of development.

Those in the know had this to say about them: “Headscarves were also represented at the runway shows of Cacharel and Yohji Yamamoto, Vera Wang, Chloe, Blumarine, Dolce & Gabbana and Gharani Strok. And according to the media, “demand is about to rocket.”

“As unlikely a contemporary accessory as it may seem - with its historic references sending out the mixed messages of being the style of monarch and peasant woman alike, at times very Buckingham Palace, at others more Coronation Street - the headscarf is back.”

“The headscarf has become the accessory of rehab chic, a kind of bohemian anti-fashion fashion that alludes, in its seeming modesty and the emphasis it places on a well-scrubbed face, to a new-found purity in an impure world. Its prim, repressed Joan Allen in Pleasantville. Only now it's Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Nicole Richie, Kate Moss and Paris Hilton, all headscarf regulars. Even Jennifer Lopez, cultivator more of a sultry image than one of abstinence and restraint, has covered up the locks.

”Certainly this is in the tradition of head coverings, which have been regularly worn in some form by women since the 14th century - captured in tapestries and tombstone engravings - through to the ribbons and bandeaux of the Regency period. According to Sonnet Stanfil, the Victoria and Albert Museum's curator of fashion, covering the hair was considered the mark of a life lived on the right path, an attitude that has trickled down through the Judeo-Christian tradition that sees headwear worn now only to church, at the most formal family events or for the grand occasions of the social calendar.

Perhaps the appeal of the headscarf is a reference to the rock'n'roll bandanna-wearing spirit. It's a look grown men attempt, with more of a post-Pirates of the Caribbean theme drawing the likes of Johnny Depp and Ashton Kutcher. "First and foremost the headscarf is a very practical item: I wear them on the beach and they're great for bad-hair days," said Nargess Gharani, co-founder of Gharani Strok. "But certainly there's something eccentric about the headscarf still, something that suggests a quirky or artistic sensibility. That means you have to be self-confident to wear one - like a hat, the headscarf can seem quite bold, especially as it pulls back the hair and frames the face. There's nothing to hide behind."

All depending, of course, on how the headscarf is being worn. Tied under the chin and worn with large sunglasses, the headscarf has provided the archetypal disguise not only for the movies' leading ladies - Audrey Hepburn, along with Jackie Onassis a style icon who adopted the headscarf as much in real life as in fiction, wears one to shadow Cary Grant in Charade, for instance - but for contemporary celebrities dodging the paparazzi. To this end Madonna is a long-standing headscarf fan. It may have worked in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, when headscarves were more commonly worn, but today one is more likely to attract rather than deflect, attention. After all, the headscarf is, as Hermès poetically has it: "A flag flying in the wind, a sail snapping on a tall mast..."

Like a man's choice of a distinctive tie, not to mention the way he ties it, so the many styles of headscarf can speak volumes, too. There is the “babushka", tied simply under the chin. The "tie behind", which is knotted behind the head. And then the most classic tie of all: the “Kelly", the scarf wrapped over the head, around the neck and tied at the rear. It takes its name from Grace Kelly who, while the popular imagination pictures her in headscarf and white gloves, actually rarely wore one, at least (with the exception of Mogambo, when Clark Gable removes it in a scene symbolic of sexual conquest) not on screen.

"The headscarf is somehow a very strange accessory," said Fulvia Visconti Ferregamo, who heads up the silk and scarves division for Ferregamo. "It's suggestive of more glamorous times and yet it's very classic. You don't have to wear it on your head, but as a belt or just tied to a bag. But what counts with a headscarf is the way it is worn and tied. Each suggests a different personality. And although life may be much faster now and it's hard to find time to look as sophisticated as women did in the 1950s, something as simple as a square of silk can lend a sense of elegance that can often be so hard to find today."

I say you should add head scarves to match headwear or make bands out of scarves that can be worn as a headwrap as well.

We found a great company at the MAGIC SHOW selling headbands in bright colorful prints. Called Violet Love by Rebecca Michaels (violetloveheadbands.com) this young company had it together for the young hip customer.