Can you remember the last time you saw a truly fabulous hat in the wild? (Anything spotted on And Just Like That … does not count.) Girls might experiment with toe shoes , neon pantyhose , and bag-charm necklaces , but when it comes to headgear we rarely get more daring than slogan baseball caps.

Sideara St. Claire would like to change that. “At a certain point, hats became a try-hard thing,” she tells me one September afternoon in her Nolita apartment, which doubles as an atelier. She stumbled into millinery, or hat-making, by accident a few years ago; now she blends classic technique with experimental avant-garde creations that have graced runways at New York Fashion Week and magazine covers. These include a cartoonish Plexiglas spiral that Cyndi Lauper wore on her “Girls Jus

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