Consciously or unconsciously, everyone wants a makeover. One place to begin is at Queen of Rogues on October 5, where Mindy Fradkin will present her one-woman show “Princess Wow and Woodstock: How a Comedic Storyteller and Hat Maker Started a Smile Revolution.”
For many years Fradkin worked as a wardrobe stylist. One day in 1990, she was preparing for a photo shoot to promote her styling career. Suddenly she remembered a hat she’d seen in a dream: “I had multicolored streamers on my deck, with stars, and I had a black cocktail hat in my closet. I’d never sewed a day in my life, but I stitched it together, and it came out great.” This flapper-style experiment led to a stint at “hat school”—the millinery department of the Fashion Institute of Technology—and a career as a hat maker.
Fradkin’s headgear has the emotional logic of successful collage; the components fit together like flowers in a vase. Her hats leap and bristle, and waft in the breeze, even when there’s no breeze. They’re humorous, eye-catching, but also strangely familiar—reminiscent of top hats, Easter bonnets, and the works of Salvador Dali.
But how to market them? Fradkin began hosting “hat happenings” in living rooms throughout New York City. Over time, her soirees expanded to include magenta wigs, feathered boas, and dramatic eyewear. Eventually, chapeaus under her label Important Hats were sold at high-fashion stores like Henri Bendel and Nordstrom’s, plus the American Craft Museum and the Philadelphia Art Museum. Fradkin also began staging hat happenings at nursing homes.
As for the origin of her stage name, Fradkin recalls: “I was always walking into a room with outrageous outfits, and people would say, ’Wow!’ So I started calling myself Miss Wow. I was having tea with a friend who wrote for the New York Times, and she goes: ’You’re not Miss Wow; you’re Princess Wow.’ And I said, ‘I like that!’”
While trying to promote a pilot for a TV show, a friend in Los Angeles inspired her to do a one-woman show. He suggested an acting coach, Jessica Lynn Johnson, who became her director, which resulted in “Ageless Wonders: A Grown-Up Kid’s Guide to Realizing We Are New.” The show dealt with the struggles of aging women in America.
Then the pandemic hit. Beginning the first week of lockdown, Fradkin began performing on Facebook Live, later switching to YouTube. Princess Wow did over 100 shows, dressed in what she calls her “happy clothes.” She brought on musical guests, did baking demonstrations, hosted virtual dance parties. “People would say I really helped them get through the worst time in their life,” Fradkin recalls.
She recently returned from the Frock Up Festival, in East Sussex, England, a yearly gathering of extravagantly dressed people, based on Frock Up Friday, a weekly Facebook fashion page that began during the pandemic. One of their slogans is “Dress for Dopamine”—in other words, fashion should be fun.
I saw “Princess Wow and Woodstock” at the Phoenicia Festival of the Arts in August. As Fradkin offered her anecdotes of a life lived in color, she doffed one hat and donned another. Each head-topping expressed an era of her life. Periodically, she’d pick up her ukulele and perform a song, such as “The Smile Revolution Is Here” (cowritten with her ex-husband, Roland Mousaa). At the end, she invited the audience to style themselves. As people—including me—put on hats, wigs, and absurd sunglasses, we transformed into 21st-century versions of Warhol superstars. It was ravishing!
