#9: Aggressively Tilted Hats
It is with great humility, and not an undue amount of apology, that I confess: I have succumbed to Bridgerton.
Last week, I learned that fan videos such as “kate and anthony being the definition of enemies to lovers” and “kanthony being painfully obvious to everyone but themselves” are deeply soothing for a PTSD relapse. The escapades of fictional characters dressed like a rainbow of macaroons are the antithesis of cowering on your couch and suspecting that you will never get past this, this being the last decade and change of your life.
Adapted from Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton romance series (eight novels, each following one Bridgerton child, published from 2000 to 2006), Netflix’s Bridgerton transposes the insular, status-obsessed world of London’s 18th century ton—the Regency-era social elite—into a society whose currency is gossip and whose crowning achievement is marriage.
In the first season, which debuted in December 2020 and was Netflix’s most-watched English language show (over 625 million views), we meet the key players: the Bridgertons, with Lord Anthony Bridgerton, the eldest Bridgerton offspring, acting as family patriarch; Queen Charlotte, who towers over the ton through power and sheer hair height; and Lady Danbury, the professional insider.
Daphne Bridgerton, the oldest daughter, stars as the focus of season one; but you could argue that it’s really Simon (Duke of Hastings), mostly because of the actor who plays him: Regé-Jean Page, acting with steely reserve as a man haunted by his past. (His mother died in childbirth; his father was abusive.)
RJP is also very, very hot.
I say that not to undermine his talent, but to emphasize that part of the appeal of Bridgerton, as a TV show, lies in how it uses beauty: as a driving force. Splashed across everything from the architecture to the woman Queen Charlotte dubs as the “Diamond” of the marriage market, beauty greases the ton’s economy. Few characters make grand speeches about beauty, as only its absence would be noteworthy.
With nearly 660 million views, the second season stole the first season’s accolade as the most-watched show. I attribute that to a few things: a notable lack of non-consensual sex (Daphne’s marital rape of Simon, which some parts of fandom deny as such); Anthony and Kate Sharma, who breath new life into the Enemies To Lovers trope; a corgi named Newton; and a genuine respect for how trauma informs the ways we fall in love—or insist we won’t.
The best part of Bridgerton, for me, is the hats. Some of them are so precariously angled, it’s amazing they stay on anyone’s head. But that is the point: the characters these hats belong to are fierce, defying both mathematics and obstacles in their way.
No clearer is this than with Lady Danbury. One of the most influential members of the ton, she is close with Queen Charlotte and delights in displaying her power via behind-the-scenes machination. She is the ultimate insider, the consummate professional at creating marriage matches; except, that is, when it comes to Lord Anthony and Edwina Sharma.
Look at the swoosh of this velvet topper. The angle of the hat isn’t exactly precarious, but it is daring. The purple conveys royalty (or perhaps, proximity to royalty), or at the very least a regal attitude; although with all respect to Lady D, her attitude is less serene, more “Do As I Say Or I Will Stab You Through The Foot With This Cane.”
In this image, the angling of the hat—30 degrees, I think; in an unrelated note, I failed tenth-grade geometry—isn’t as clear, because of the perspective, but the difference between Lady D’s get-up and that of the Sharma women demonstrates why the angle is important. She is a woman of velveteen confidence! All fabric trembles before her!
Oh God, THIS HAT (featuring a truly feral Anthony Bridgerton). This whole look is a Look—the embroidery on her lapel alone!—but the hat is its crowning achievement. Because Anthony is absolutely gone for this woman, he needs to teach her how to shoot. (She already knows how.) The hat serves as their chaperone, blocking Anthony’s forehead from touching Kate’s—but it’s an incompetent one, because the rest of Anthony is as close to Kate as possible; and as we all know, in Regency times, the Hand Touch is sex.
Early in the season, Anthony outlines his approach to selecting—and it is a selection, at least initially—a wife. “I do not need feelings,” Anthony tells his friends. “What I need is what I have, and that is a list.”
Anthony was eighteen when his father died, leaving him as the head of the household. Grief consumed his mother: she ripped herself from the world and burrowed inward. As a de-facto father to his seven siblings, witnessing his devastated mother, he vowed never to marry for love—fearing that he would die young, like his father, or that his wife would, and grief would destroy whoever was still alive. Loving somebody necessarily entails losing them; that is the bravery of love in the first place. (And as Vision says in WandaVision, “What is grief if not love persevering?”)
With Anthony, we see how Bridgerton’s second season doesn’t abuse or manipulate trauma—as, I believe, season one does for Simon, and his choice not to have children; through rape, Daphne wrenches that choice away from him, doubling the original trauma.
Anthony’s past, on the other hand, is allowed to remain intact, legitimate; even though his declaration of “I have a list!” is extraordinarily stupid—Kate Sharma exists—the narrative does not demean the reasons why. Instead, it shows us, over the course of eight episodes, that love does not often conform, or neatly fit into one vector (I didn’t completely fail geometry, you know; I just got a D). Here, the cliché is true: love has a mind of its own.
Last week, when I squirreled myself onto the couch, I did not yet understand that what I was feeling was grief, specifically the grief of estrangement: to leave your family is to go against every instinct you have as a human animal. Grief showed up in my house, and I mistook it for failure. Mine.
Now, writing this, I just laugh. From one meme to another: babe you’re not a “squirrel” you have grief from a choice that didn’t feel like a choice and are stubborn about letting yourself face that.
If I had a fun hat, ideally a purple crushed velvet top-hat, angled at 50 degrees (OR MORE! POWER LIES IN POSSIBILITY!), I would jam that on my head, march around the place while blasting a strings cover of “Material Girl," and announce that I have feelings and also a list, and the first thing on that list is to live, materially, in the world: which means, loving, and loving you.
Your turn! What’s your small good thing of the week?
Let Me Tell You About Gidget
After a hard day’s work of deep sea diving, she surfaced for dinner, then complained about the quality of the service, which remains, outrageously, lacking.
A Continual Note of Gratitude
Like everything I write these days, this was written during sessions of The Writers’ Hour, an online hourly Zoom writing session hosted by the London Writer’s Salon. LWS is an online writing community so lovely and supportive that reminds me why I love writing in the first place.
Gosh now I need to watch the show but something tells me it won't live up to your writing, which is, without a doubt, incredible. So in love with this substack and am so thrilled whenever it lands in my inbox.
"a genuine respect for how trauma informs the ways we fall in love—or insist we won’t"
this (piece, overall, everything, the geometry) was very good. my heart has also been shoved up against grief recently (rude!), wondering at residual love.