WASHINGTON — Ninety-year-old Vanilla Beane is a milliner who knows that a hat can be so much more than mere headgear.
Look no further than Beane’s favorite customer: civil-rights pioneer Dorothy Height, whose hats were known far and wide as a statement of her dignity and grace.
When Height died at age 98 this spring, some of her friends and admirers — Beane among them — wore hats to her funeral as a final tribute. The audience was dotted with colorful creations, and the eulogist-in-chief noted Height’s most distinctive feature in his remarks.
“We loved those hats that she wore like a crown,” said President Barack Obama.
Now one of Beane’s creations is to be immortalized in a modest memorial to Height in front of the southwest Washington building where the civil-rights leader lived for 27 years. A metal replica of a Vanilla Beane original — painted hot pink — will be placed atop one of the city’s obsolete emergency call boxes this month, part of a citywide initiative to restore the 19th-century structures as works of art.
Beane, whose custom-made creations can run up to $500, said she thinks hats are making a comeback, thanks in part to church-sponsored teas and the attention paid to Height.
When she is not busy on a customer’s order, she plays with designs for herself. “I don’t like too large a hat,” she said. “I’m very conservative.”
