Depending on where you live (& the way you read dates), Mad Hatter’s Day can either be June the 10th or October the 6th. Well, June 10th is today, so I say we celebrate it now! (There’s no reason why we can’t go back for a repeat performance in October — nor do you really need an excuse to wear a magnificent mantle.)

So what’s the deal with Mad Hatter’s Day? Well, it’s a celebration of the character from Alice In Wonderland, & you can do this in a number of ways, but the easiest thing to do is wear a hat.

Hats hats hats. I love my hats. My love affair with hats began very early, & started with my mother, who always said, “If you want someone to remember you, wear a hat”. (Perhaps I took that a step further with my candy-coloured tresses, hmm?) I adore seeing someone in the street in a hat, & wish more people would wear them. They are so incredibly chic & fabulous.

How can you work a hat into your outfit? Firstly, don’t be intimidated. Remember that your choice of head covering doesn’t have to be a floppy sunhat with a diameter of 100 centimetres (um, 40 inches)! You can go minimal with a beanie or snood (pin something a little sparkly to it to glam it up!), tie a vintage scarf around your noggin or affix an adorned slide to the side of your noodle!

Of course, if you do have a great hat, this is the perfect day to wear it, but don’t feel that you have to go the whole millinery hog. If you work customer service & have a headset on all day, a wonderful bonnet is going to be quite inconvenient. Just work with what you’ve got!

If you don’t have a hat, a plain headband will do in a pinch as you can stick virtually anything to it. A toy car? A gift bow? A firecracker? Use your imagination & be bold! Another place to look is in your boxes of Christmas ornaments — not the baubles, I’m thinking more like fake birds. Often they have clips on the bottom of them, so you can attach them to your hair with ease (but be careful when you take them out because the teeth are usually serrated)!

There are so many headbands around at the moment that you can totally take your pick. I have a huge selection, mostly bought from Forever 21, where they run around $2-$6 apiece. They’re adorned with all sorts of things, from flowers to butterflies to enormous grosgrain bows & they top off an outfit brilliantly. There are also faux-flower hair clips everywhere, which you can just slide into your hair at an angle for super style points.

Channel Isabella Blow (above left). She was known for her outrageous collection of hats & wore them with incredible style. She was quoted as saying that she liked wearing them primarily because they helped keep people away!

When she sported antlers to a lunch with Nicholas Coleridge, he reasonably inquired: “How are you going to eat with those on?” “Nicholas,” she replied to her then boss, “that is of no concern to me whatsoever.”

Here are a few ways that some stylish girls around the globe celebrated Mad Hatter’s Day…

On Mad Hatter’s Day, Isobel Oval took her dachshund (Dahl) for a walk, played the drums for a couple of hours & danced around her bedroom to old Hole records. She finished the day up at her favourite bar, where she sat with her boots up on the counter & kicked several boys asses at darts.

Lauryn met her best friend in a playground for a mad tea-party. They ate peach cobbler, hung upside down from tree branches & whistled show-tunes while swinging as high as they could.

Jane wore small flower hair-clips to a party in her neighbour’s garden. When she got sick of her neighbour’s husband hitting on her, she took off her shoes & sat in the fountain for an hour.

Audrey had intense cabin fever from sitting inside the house painting for 4 days straight — so she got gussied up & walked around the botanic gardens in the rain, while listening to Elliott Smith.