On and off the avenue: top hats.(women's hats and hat shops)

"That Easter-bonnet thing is strictly amateur day, like New Year's Eve for night-life people," said Linda Pagan, who describes her typical customer at THE HAT SHOP (120 Thompson St.; 219-1445) as "a style person, not a fashion person.'' On a recent Sunday afternoon at her downtown shop, Pagan was herself a living illustration of this type: she was clad in a pair of Second World War-era jodhpurs tucked into Wellingtons, a Vivienne Westwood sweater, and a tattersall hat with leather piping called a crusher and made by a designer named Princess Foufou. "Trim little hats! Baby blue! Seersucker!" Pagan said when asked what styles her customers are likely to want this season. "And I think toile is going to be big." She took off the Princess Foufou and modelled a squishy white-and-blue hat printed in an allover pattern featuring milkmaids ($88). Though Pagan sticks almost exclusively to New York milliners, she admitted that she will make an exception for an exceptional hat. "These travel hats actually come from Sydney. They're made of water hyacinths, and you revive them with water. The designer came into the shop with a stack of them, put them on a chair, and sat on them. I couldn't resist."

Though KELLY CHRISTY made most of the headgear for the Roundabout's recent revival of "The Women," a trifle in her Nolita storefront (235 Elizabeth St.; 965-0686) is too far out for even the wackiest revival of that play: it's a flat disk of shimmery fabric featuring four mallards sitting on it as if it were a deep-blue silk lagoon. "It's my Veronica Lake duck-pond hat," Christy says. "I made it for an exhibit sponsored by British Airways. There's a gallery space in the Concorde lounge." Not ...