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He preferred a tuxedo and a high black silk hat, but he was a master of disguise and an escape artist, and for years, he’d danced in circles around the authorities.

Large sheer silk hats fluttered by — like a rain cloud being blown by the wind.

“But sometimes it’s kind of fun just to have something — like an old silk hat,” says Carol Estep, president of the DuPont museum board.

She was wearing a new blue silk hat, draped with half a yard of spotted lace for a veil.

In a society that after World War II was gripped by modernity, Mr. Austin might as well have been peddling silk hats and spats.