Blossom: “And bring the hat.”

That was the instruction Jenna von Oÿ got after her first audition for Blossom — four words tucked into a callback notice that would help shape the future of a character before a single line of the pilot had been shot. She had worn a wide-brimmed purple hat to the first reading almost on instinct, the kind of thing a teenager throws on without thinking twice. The casting team thought twice. When they called her back, they didn't just want her. They wanted the hat too.

To understand why that detail mattered, it helps to remember what NBC was trying to build in 1990. Blossom wasn't a sure thing walking through the door. Creator Don Reo had just come off Molloy, a sitcom whose development had gone badly enough that new writers were brought in, the tone shifted, and, in Reo's telling, the show eventually drifted toward the kind of cheap jokes he didn't want to make. Blossom was his course correction: a sitcom about a teenage girl growing up with her divorced father and two brothers, built around the idea that a teenage girl could be funny without the joke always being at her expense. The premise was familiar enough, but the tone mattered, and Reo knew the casting would determine whether the show could pull it off. He has said that once he found the right actors for his two central roles, he never considered anyone else.

Mayim Bialik's casting came together with a similar sense of instant recognition — and, fittingly, another hat. Reo has described watching her audition tape, where she was wearing a silly hat and talking “48 miles a minute,” and knowing almost immediately: this is her, this is the kid. There was something unpolished and completely natural about the performance that fit what he had imagined for Blossom. Bialik has said that the Blossom script was the first one she ever read that made her laugh out loud, because its sense of humor felt so close to her own. In both cases, the casting process seems to have worked less like a search for someone who could manufacture the character and more like a recognition that the character was already partly there.

That makes the parallel with von Oÿ especially appealing. The actresses weren't auditioning for the same role, and their hats didn't somehow create the characters they would play, but both arrived carrying a little piece of themselves into a process that was supposed to turn actors into fictional teenagers. Von Oÿ's purple hat caught the attention of the people casting Six, and when she was called back, they specifically asked her to bring it. Six would eventually become one of the show's most memorable supporting characters, and her rapid-fire energy and distinctive look fit naturally alongside Blossom's equally exaggerated visual identity. The wardrobe department could refine the characters later, but the instinct came first.

That is how Blossom's hats became so much more than a costume detail. The floppy hats, oversized flowers and deliberately ridiculous combinations eventually became the visual shorthand for the character, one of the first things people remember when they picture the show more than three decades later. Yet there was never some grand plan in which a room full of writers decided that Blossom Russo needed to become “the girl with the hats.” The look grew organically from the personality Mayim brought into the room, just as Six's look incorporated something Jenna had brought with her. Television characters are often remembered as if every detail was designed from the beginning, when sometimes the details that last are the ones nobody planned.

Von Oÿ has recalled flying to Los Angeles for the screen test as an extraordinary stroke of luck, particularly because she was the only girl brought in for that particular opportunity. She has suggested that it was probably the kind of break she would never experience in quite the same way again. Reo, meanwhile, has continued to talk about the casting of Bialik and von Oÿ with an almost startling certainty: once he saw the right person, there wasn't much left to debate. That certainty is part of what makes the stories interesting now. In an industry built around auditions, callbacks, testing and executives trying to predict what audiences will respond to, sometimes the decision apparently comes down to something much simpler — a performer walks into a room, does something that feels completely natural, and the person watching realizes they've found the character.

More than three decades later, Bialik and von Oÿ still talk, and Joey Lawrence, who played Blossom's brother Joey, has said the cast continues to reunite and occasionally discusses the possibility of doing something together again if the timing ever works. Whatever eventually comes of that, there is something fitting about the fact that a show remembered so vividly for its hats began with two young actresses who weren't trying to create an image at all. They simply showed up as themselves, wearing something they liked, and the people making Blossom were paying close enough attention to notice.