Audrey Hepburn (1929 - 1993)
in the costume for the Ascot scene in My Fair Lady (1964)
designed by Cecil Beaton (1904 - 1980)

From Cecil Beaton's The Glass of Fashion (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1954):

"The women who leaned over my crib (in 1904) had not yet forgone the llines of the hourglass and were laced into corsets... Perched on their heads, and elevated by a little roll just inside the crown, were hats which had grown as frivolous as the milliner's trade could make them - enormous galleons of grey velvet with vast grey plumes of ostrich feathers sweeping upwards and outwards, or they would be trimmed with artificial flowers and fruit."

A Director of Photography I worked with years ago told me the story of shooting a famous funeral scene on a certain popular prime time soap opera in the 80s.  Or it might have been a courtroom scene, I'm not sure it makes a difference; in any event, the two lead actresses both got to wear hats, apparently quite large and fabulous ones, and consequently every other actress on the show wanted a hat too and berated Wardrobe and called their agents and managers and the producers and cried and refused to come to the set until they all got one.  

"It was a fucking nightmare," the D.P. explained.  "You don't realize how short these broads are until you try and shoot a room full of 'em wearing hats.  And these were big fucking hats.  Plus this is the 80s too, remember, with the 28 shades of eyeshadow and glycerine tears and mink eyelashes?  So don't even ask how we managed to get the close-ups.  You ever try lighting midgets with umbrellas?  Well that's what it was like.  A bunch of fucking midgets with umbrellas." 



Michael Owen, (born 1979), professional footballer and striker for Manchester United, at Ascot.
Note the hat in the background.

Cecil Beaton was 60 when he defined the look of the Edwardian Age in My Fair Lady for a new generation.  Directed by his contemporary George Cukor, (1899 - 1983) who would direct Rich and Famous over fifteen years later, both men were of the same generation and similar sensibility.  And worlds apart in other respects: "Cukor's and Beaton's prickly collaboration is one of the storied aspects of My Fair Lady" (George Cukor: A Double Life, Patrick McGilligan, New York: St. Martin's, 1991, page 285 - 86):  Cukor viewed Beaton's claim that he'd made love to Greta Garbo with, "to put it kindly" much skepticism.  To Cukor, Beaton was "an effeminate dandy in affected Ewardian suits, enormous broad-brimmed panamas, and floppy fin-de-siecle hats."

To Cecil, (according to his biographer Hugo Vickers), who'd been to parties Cukor gave and "was sickened by the obscene language amongst the Impressionist paintings," Cukor was a disturbing collection of paradoxes, namely "his love-hate relationship with Britain, with homosexuals and with intellectuals."

Sensibility, like hats, can be very complicated.