Timidity Be Damned

COLLISION 00029

It was yet another blustery day in Spain.

During the three weeks I was there in March 2025, sunshine had only conquered the downpours, showers and perpetual drizzle but a handful of times and for what seemed like only the briefest of windows. I had grown used to but weary of being chronically damp and cold wherever I went.

While Spain’s tapas bars, brimming with their vermouth, cava and Rioja, had become the most obvious places of refuge when Mother Nature opened her floodgates, its artisan workshops and boutiques, trading on the promise of warming retail therapy, had also never failed to make things right.

In retrospect, I have all that gray and gloom to thank. It inspired me to purchase a long-coveted though somewhat obscure accessory. For the better part of a decade, I had wanted a proper winter hat. The structured, elegant kind, worn by ladies and starlets in the first half of the twentieth century. Never mind where I would actually wear said hat. I would work that part out later.

I only saw these aforementioned hats on rare and special occasions in Chicago, crowning the chicest of Windy City heads. I had always been keen to know what it would feel like to have such a delicate embellishment adorn me. Fabulous Seville, Spain, with its highly rated millinery just down the street from one of my lunch reservations, seemed like the ideal place from which to finally join this small, illustrious club.

I approached inQuercu’s storefront with what turned out to be a cautious but fleeting optimism. As it all but fizzled, doubt rushed in, and with each advancing step, a chiding, unproductive reluctance held me back. Suddenly, I didn’t feel so brave, and I definitely didn’t feel chic enough to go inside. If I couldn’t even go in the store, how was I ever going to don the hat?

This all seemed like one big fool’s errand.

A shopper’s curiosity got the better of me, though. As I walked past the open doorway, my eyes swept over as much of the charming little studio as they could until my feet were forced by renewed wanting and courage to stop in their tracks.

The studio was one part artist’s workshop, messy but contained; and one part artist’s showroom, bursting with talent and taste. There were hats of all colors and shapes and for all seasons displayed throughout the space. Some stacked one on top of the other, others proudly exhibited solo on hat stands or mannequin heads, while others rested, just so here and there, unfinished works in progress, like thoughts dropped mid-sentence.

Timidity be damned. I had to buy my hat here.

The milliner and owner was a brilliantly stylish artistic type who instantly embraced the matchmaking challenge I laid before her. I trusted her instincts and felt like I was in the absolute best of hands.

She spoke very little English, but we got by in the beginning with unlikely help from an older gentleman and customer, who had been in the store when I walked in. At some point, though, as we endlessly bounced about from hat to hat, silhouette to silhouette, color to color, our volunteer interpreter grew bored and, understandably, slipped away.

The milliner and I continued on just fine without him. I had every bit of confidence in her process and eye, feeling lucky to be her solitary study and subject that afternoon. The purchase experience was no doubt going to be as special as the purchase. Silly as it sounds, I had always wanted to be the kind of woman who wore one of these hats. And I knew she didn’t need to speak my language to understand that.

It started to become obvious which hat was going to come home with me. There was a burgundy-colored cloche we both kept coming back to, but it was missing something until she plucked a brown-and-white speckled feather from a nearby black hat I had liked and slid it into my hat’s satin trim.

She stood in front of me and placed the hat on my head, making the tiniest of micro-adjustments for what felt like an eternity. With a flourish of her wrist, she finished and stepped aside.

That’s when I locked eyes with the woman wearing the elegant burgundy-colored cloche hat in the mirror just in front of me.