Use to be able to when 1.9 was first released. Made for good bunny ears. Now when trying to wear an elytra on your head via /hat, it states 'You cannot use this item as a hat!'.

The code in charge of causing that code has not been modified in years. From the looks of it, this was a bug in spigot regarding max-durability of elytra being 0 whereas it's actually greater than that.

I don't feel it is a great idea to mess around with this just for elytra. Maybe if this feature attracts more attention it might be reconsidered. :)

That's unfortunate. Elytra was one of the few items that actually looked great as a hat. :( Oh well, thanks for considering.