Hats 9780857851611, 9781474285346, 9780857851604

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Hats Clair Hughes

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In memory of Anne Hollander

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Hats Clair Hughes

Blo om s bu r y V i s u a l A r t s A n i mpr i nt of Blo om s bu r y P u bl i s h i ng

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Bloomsbury Visual Arts An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as A&C Black Visual Arts

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© Clair Hughes, 2017 Clair Hughes has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN:

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ePDF: 978-0-8578-5160-4

978-0-8578-5161-1



ePub: 978-0-8578-5158-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hughes, Clair, 1941- author. Title: Hats / Clair Hughes Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016025591 | ISBN 9780857851611 (hardcover) ISBN 9780857851581 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Hats—History. Headgear—History. Classification: LCC GT2110 .H84 2017 | DDC 391.4/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016025591 Series: Elements of Dress, 20470843 Cover design: Sharon Mah Typeset by Lachina

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

6

Introduction

8

1 Hat-making, makers and places

12

2 Hats and power

36

3 Affiliations and occupations

64

4 Etiquette and class

94

5 Bowlers & ‘bergères’

120

6 Entertaining hats

148

7 Sporting hats

176

8 Fashion hats

208

Endnotes

250



263

List of illustrations

Bibliography

272

Index

279

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acknowledgements

In the course of working on this book I have

of The Order of the Holy Child of Jesus

incurred a great many debts. I owe the greatest

produced not only some enchanting

debt of all to my husband, George Hughes, who

photographs but amusing memories of school

has provided interest, encouragement and help

hats. To the kindness and talent of artist Lyn

throughout. The importance of hats is not always

Constable Maxwell I owe not only the time-line

self-evident, but he never had doubts. Kathryn

of hats but also the drawing of her Chapel Hat.

Earle at Berg and at Bloomsbury has provided

Candice Hern, John Hannavy, Meg Andrews,

invaluable encouragement and friendship, and

Peter Ashworth and Geoffrey Batchen kindly

my editors, Hannah Crump, Ariadne Godwin,

supplied images. I particularly want to

Pari Thomson were unfailingly helpful and

acknowledge those institutions that gave me

good-humored in dealing with various blips

images gratis: Locks of St. James’s, The Los

along the way. Difficulties with illustrations were

Angeles County Museum, The Paul Mellon

resolved by their recommendation of Rosily

Collection at Yale, The New York Metropolitan

Roberts as assistant, and I am very grateful for

Museum, Luton Museum, The Garrick Club and

her efficient and cheerful help.

The National Trust of Scotland. The Colonial

Many individuals and most museums have

Williamsburg Museum of Virginia was very

been generous and helpful over illustrative

modest in its charges and very generous with

material. Ben Walker and Rose Scott

its help.

photographed key sites for me. In Castle Birr I

Many have joined in the hat hunt, sending

enjoyed the hospitality of the Countess Rosse

me hat-related material: daughter Pernille,

who showed me Maud Messel’s hat, allowed

sisters Nina and Joanna, friends Jane Whetnall,

me to handle it and had it photographed. I had

Sybil Oldfield, Prudence Black, Michael Carter

much military-headgear talk with Dr. William

and Susan Vincent. I am grateful to Nicholas

Beaver who allowed me to use his image of

Payne Baader of Locks of St. James’s for telling

the Household Guards. A fascinating

me about the life and history of that unique

correspondence with Sister Helen Forshaw

place. Eton, Harrow and Norland College

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archivists were helpful, as was the curator of Stockport HatWorks. Much gratitude goes to Veronica Main, now retired as curator of Luton Museum. Her enthusiasm for and unparalleled knowledge of the straw-hat industry has been crucial to my work and my conversations with her were a delight. I also spent a fascinating afternoon with designer Wendy Edmonds when she described to me her experiences as a young milliner in London’s West End of the 1970s. Oriole Cullen of The Victoria and Albert Museum was an early advisor, putting me into contact with Shirley Hex, once chief milliner for Freddie Fox, teacher at the Royal College of Art, mentor and inspiration for milliners such as Philip Treacy and Stephen Jones. She was extremely generous with her time and hospitality and provided me with unique insights into the world of hat making. She was and is a key figure in the story of British fashion. Finally, I wish to dedicate this book to the memory of Anne Hollander: her work on dress and art history was my inspiration and her friendship in her last years was a precious and unlooked for gift.

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introduction

H

is workroom is a strange place, the London milliner Stephen Jones has said: ‘half Aladdin’s cave, half artist’s studio’. Using centuries-old techniques, ‘hats are coaxed into

life’, straw is tortured ‘into doing what it doesn’t want to do’; finally the hats are allowed to develop in their own way and, as it were, make themselves.1 Jones seems to suggest that hats have autonomous lives: the milliner – or hatter – creates a hat, and then releases it into the world. François Mitterand’s hat in a French novel of 2012 by Antoine Laurain, The President’s Hat, certainly has a life of its own. Left behind in a Paris brasserie, this hat finds its way into four people’s lives, drastically changing them – not always for the better. A hat that has such an effect need not be dramatic in shape or style – Mitterand’s hat in Laurain’s novel is an ordinary felt fedora – but hats, Jones says, confer a presence on the wearer that no other element of dress can achieve. A hat is the important accessory, immediately visible and strikingly important for one’s overall appearance. Men’s hats are bought from ‘hatters’— which, as we shall see, often have a fascinating history. Women’s hats embody the imaginative work of creative designers, and are marketed in a rather different way. But for both men and women, since hats play such an important role in our appearance, they are also risky. How do you make sure you have the right hat?

This book is not a chronological history of hat fashions or of the process of hat-making, though such topics play their part in the overall scheme of the book. (I do, however, include sketches of hat styles between 1700 and 1970 for reference.) I am principally concerned in what follows with the culture of the hat, with the social context that surrounds it, with the use and experience of hats and, above all, with what they signify in all their multiple forms. For this I draw on the work of many dress historians past and present, to whose detailed researches I am much indebted. But since I am primarily interested in hats in relation to social practice, I also draw heavily on such sources as advice books, autobiographies, novels and different kinds of pictorial evidence. I am keenly aware that there is no single reading of the role of hats: there are multiple, conflicting readings, different readings for male and female hats and readings that depend on one’s standpoint. The social implications of the top hat, for example, are not the same from one generation to another. Hats can suggest an entire narrative: in this postcard [1] of 1900 from a Welsh seaside resort, Pa in a smart fedora, Ma in a mean little bonnet and Daughter in a pretty ‘halo’ hat are observed by a

8

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introduction

vicar in a shovel hat and a keen young man in a cloth cap – without headgear there is no story. Until the mid-twentieth century, life for a felt hat or a straw hat had begun long before it reached the Aladdin’s caves of workshops in London, Paris or New York. It might all have started in the northern English town of Stockport or the Midlands town of Luton, for example, or in Caussade near Lyon in France, or in Danbury, Connecticut, USA. It was in these places that the raw materials of felt and straw were shaped – sometimes by noxious, difficult and delicate processes – into hats that might then figure importantly in their national markets, or be exported worldwide. The story of hat production is the basic topic of my opening chapter, while in subsequent chapters I concentrate on the use of different kinds of hats in different circumstances. Behind my narrative there looms the fact (sad for hat history, fascinating for the historian) that hat-wearing suddenly and hugely declined in the second half of the twentieth century. Hats had been mandatory wear throughout Europe for centuries and there was an immense and complex market for hats, but around 1960 a seismic upheaval took place in cultural and social attitudes that affected production, distribution and use of hats as well as the image of the hat in modern society. Hats are quite simply no longer everyman’s or everywoman’s everyday wear. Hats are, however, still worn, and I pursue my theme through looking at the historic role of hats from various angles. I consider hats and social power (chapter two), hats that register affiliations and occupations (chapter three), hats and etiquette (chapter four), two iconic hats, the bowler and bergère (chapter five), hats and the world of entertainment (chapter six), sporting hats (chapter seven) and hats in fashion (chapter eight). When hats are worn today it is often for practical, protective reasons, taking the rather anodyne

1 Seaside postcard, 1900.

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Left

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hats

forms of baseball caps or woolly ‘beanies’ in winter. But the past lives of hats are embedded in our cultural memory bank and in the social rituals where they still have a role. Why do weddings or horse races awaken a hat-urge, for example? Why do we assume that royalty will wear hats? And why do we wear hats when meeting royalty? There are moments when it suddenly becomes important to have the ‘correct’ hat, and moments when hats are newsworthy. We see in chapter eight how hats have taken on an exuberant new life as talking points and as artworks, and how they have become freed of much of the network of earlier rules and conventions. Some of our hat-practice is then determined simply by external factors (the need to keep warm). Some is determined by external factors that produce real physical constraints on the wearer (sports hats, military or fireman’s helmets). Much hat-practice depends upon abstract ideologies that have laid down elaborate systems of rules (hats in religion, in military parades, in hospitals or in schools). Hats on men are only too often about status and power. Wearing a hat, said a French humorist, gives you a feeling of authority over someone who isn’t. Hat-practice has also been connected to chivalric etiquette and politeness: when to do ‘hat honour’, what kind of hat to choose for which occasion. To whom do you doff your hat? When and where? The minefields of bourgeois manners were endless in their time and produced not only a profitable market in advice manuals for the nervous or socially ambitious, but also much material for novelists. I discuss in chapter four the role of the hat in relation to etiquette and social class, noting that rebellious or dissenting hats provided useful codes for writers, satirists and painters. A ‘slouch’ hat, for example, could signal anarchy, even villainy. A ‘wrong’ hat might be exactly ‘right’ for the rebel of the family. Hat-practice is above all irredeemably bound up with the ephemeral delights of fashion, the

1700

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1720

1730

1760

1770

1790

1835

1840

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introduction

jockeying for attention of male and female, of flirt and cad, of youth and age, of rich and poor, of courtly and vulgar, of city and country, of the ‘fashionista’ and the sensible purchaser of a ‘classic’, well-made hat. Fashion is everywhere important in the book, but my final chapter is concerned with fashion hats. Named hats – a Leghorn, a Panama or a Stetson – are not single stable objects but fashion items whose styles undergo constant, if sometimes infinitesimal, changes. Fashion hats today, however, not only look different from those of the past, but also have quite other meanings, other roles in our culture. As in that moment around 1780 when Rose Bertin invented the fashion hat for Marie Antoinette, the milliners, hatters and wearers of our contemporary society have become free to invent in new ways and to take new risks. Hats, I am glad to say, have not lost their riskiness. It has become especially important that hats can be connected to make-believe, may take on the otherworldliness of feathers or pile up outlandish decoration – particularly in the world of entertainment, spectacle and film. The most celebrated hats have often been found in show business. Among those I discuss, for example, are Chaplin’s bowler, Dietrich’s beret and Lily Elsie’s ‘Merry Widow’. Such hats can inspire a fashion or can be ironic, or may have to be read at ‘second degree’. But more than this they are, quite simply, memorable. A hat can after all be changed more quickly and more often than a coat. Hats are also synonyms for disguise and President Mitterand’s character, it turns out, was darker than one knew. His hat (born in Aladdin’s cave) was, Antoine Laurain speculated, a kind of undercover agent, a sinister and powerful double. The culture of hats may thus reveal things we had not expected. An exploration of that culture uncovers much that is fascinating about ourselves, our customs and our society.

1860

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1880

1900

1910

1920

1925

1940

1965

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1 Hat-making, makers and places

I

n the history of hats there have been great and famous designers. Figures like Rose Bertin designed hats for Marie Antoinette in eighteenth century Paris, Caroline Reboux designed

hats for the Empress Eugénie and ‘Lucile’ designed hats for fin de siècle ladies in London and New York. Between the 1940s and 1950s Lilly Daché made magnificent hats for Hollywood stars, while Aage Thaarup reigned in London. Stephen Jones and Philip Treacy today are international celebrities whose hats are now bought by museums. Behind all that these designers did and do, however, lie the skills of making, trimming and distributing hats. Manufacture, methods and materials have changed over the centuries, but some characteristics have nonetheless been preserved. I shall be discussing later on the high end of hat fashion; in this chapter we look at the fundamental production of felt and straw hats, at the shift to mechanisation and finally at an enduring and iconic hat shop. It is a story in which the modest English towns of Luton and Stockport assume a remarkable importance but also one in which London and Paris continue to lead and shape the life of hats.

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hats

Reflecting on the mysterious, wayward nature

done so. In nineteenth century England the

of headgear, Stephen Jones concluded that,

straw bonnet-makers of Luton wouldn’t work

‘hats often make themselves’.1 A nineteenth

before 9.00 am, though it would have been to

century hatter, discussing hats, attributes the

their advantage.

Turks’ dislike of them to their belief that ‘they

‘There are really two hat-tales to recount’,

are put together by witchcraft’. A hat makes a

Michael Carter says in his essay on hats, ‘one

statement about a personality and, most

for men and one for women’. 4 Women’s hats are

importantly, about a vision of self: it is a

about beauty, taste and conspicuous

dramatic – if perilous – personal signature. ‘It

consumption, and are therefore transient,

2

is the hat that matters most’, says Rezia, a

varied and individualized; men’s hats are more

milliner, in Virginia Woolf’s novel of 1923, Mrs

uniform, and, being about symbolism and

Dalloway. What matters might be the lustre of

status, fall into recognizable categories in

an eighteenth century beaver, the tilt of a

which the slightest variation signifies. The

battered nineteenth century topper or the wit

gender divide is restated in the material of the

of a 1940s Surrealist confection. A hat has the

hat. Hats can and have been made from almost

licence to be what it wants: separate from the

anything, from gold to shoes. But two materials

body, anchored only to a head below, it can

dominate: felt and straw. Plain dark felt is, on

take off in any direction in almost any material

the whole, male; light decorated straw, female.

and much can happen as it leaps into the void.

Women, however, regularly filch from men, for

Hats, like the best pleasures, are risky.

feathered felts lend panache and power.

3

But there is also the basic question of how a

Husband-stealing Blanche Silcox, for example,

hat is made, and I am concerned here,

in Elizabeth Jenkins’ novel of 1954, The

principally though not exclusively, with

Tortoise and the Hare, ‘appeared very

hat-making in Britain between 1700 and 2000.

intimidating [in] … stiff felts with unusually

Looking across this span it is striking how far

large-domed crowns … that were absolutely

it was and still is craft-based, and how little

formidable’. 5 Formidable women from Tudor

and late it was mechanized. And, if hats have

times onward have sported the ‘cavalier’ style,

minds of their own, hat-makers too have shown

one particularly associated with hunting. The

stubborn independence and often sheer

nineteenth century silk top hat was similarly

cussedness. The hatters of eighteenth century

‘borrowed’. There is little traffic the other way,

France, for example, refused to make more than

however; a man in a female hat is engaging in

two felt hats a day, though they could have

burlesque.

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Hat-making, makers and pl aces

T he Beaver H at

Happily – if not for beavers – the New World

2 Eighteenth century

Blanche Silcox’s felt, drawing on the authority

offered an apparently limitless supply of pelts to

beaver hat

and status of the beaver hat, indicates power. It

French, Dutch and British traders. E. E. Rich, in

was the Spanish and Dutch who popularized

a rare lyrical moment, writes how ‘furs bore

these hats in Europe in the early sixteenth

such promise of great wealth that they might …

century and male portraiture testifies to their

seize men’s imaginations and provide that flux

importance not only as an objects of strong

of fortune-seeking which was in men’s minds at

hierarchical implication but as signs of wealth

the middle of the seventeenth century’. 8 When

[2]. Beaver was the best hat fur, and only

the British ousted the Dutch from North

downy under-hairs were used; the proportion of

America, they secured over a million pounds in

beaver used determined its quality and thus its

weight of pelts a year, establishing themselves

price. The felting process was messy and

as rivals to the French.

arduous, consequently good hats were

below

This competitive trade affected not only

expensive [3]. In England in 1661 Samuel

European politics but also the Native American

Pepys, for example, paid 45 shillings (£284

peoples who provided the pelts. The settlers

today) for a beaver hat; in eighteenth century France a good beaver cost three livres (c. £60 today), an ordinary wool felt, fifteen sous (c. £15 today); and in 1870, London journalist George Sala marvelled that ‘a brown beaver … could cost fifteen guineas (£1,300 today) [though] I have one which cost twenty’. 6 According to the Hudson Bay Company’s historian, E. E. Rich, the beaver fur used for hats was the most valuable single item of European trade from its beginnings to the end of the eighteenth century. The cost, however, was more than financial. It takes ten pelts to produce one good hat.7 Many beavers were needed therefore to satisfy the socially ambitious, and by 1600 the beaver population of Europe had been wiped out.

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hats

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Hat-making, makers and pl aces

needed the native tribes for trapping, and the French and British played the tribes against

Stockport and the F elting Process

3 Robert Lloyd’s hats and prices, 1819.

each other as hunting moved westwards.

The London Feltmakers’ guild did not control

Tribes destroyed one another as well as the

manufacture for long. Restrictions over

beaver in battles for hunting grounds and

apprenticeships and wages caused hatters to

trading rights. The trade changed the ecology

look outside the city for cheaper alternatives.

and social organization of the tribes: with

By the early eighteenth century London

hunters absent for years at a time, agriculture

hatters, while retaining the finishing and

and food sources declined. By 1650 the tribes

wholesale sides of the trade, had turned to

had become dependent on fur to buy arms,

journeyman hatters in the provinces for the

tools, food and liquor from Europeans. In 1736

main stages of manufacture. Northward, on a

France ceded Canada to Britain, but profits

turnpike road (now the A6), lies Stockport, near

were short-lived – John Jacob Astor’s

Manchester and the port of Liverpool; there

American Fur Company took over the trade

was no guild, but there was an existing textile

after American independence. Astor is still

industry and a river – and water was crucial to

considered to have been one of the world’s

the felting process. By 1771 Arthur Young, in

richest men. The cause of these conflicts,

his Tour through the North of England,

these social and cultural derangements, was

considered the hat to be one of the principal

the profit to be had from this one small animal.

manufactures of the area. 9 In 1800 Stockport

The subsequent stages from fur to finished hat were scarcely happier. The fur trade, manufacture and retail of felt hats in Britain

opposite

and nearby Denton were making Britain’s hats and exporting to Europe and the Colonies. The fragmented nature of hat making lent

were initially based in London in the dubious

itself to outwork and at first the main stages of

riverside areas of Southwark and Bermondsey,

production took place in simple extensions to

and first regulated in the seventeenth century

agricultural workers’ homes. In March 2014, an

by the Worshipful Company of the Art or

outhouse in a garden in Denton was found to

Mistery of Feltmakers. ‘Mistery’ means

have been a hatter’s planking shop and bow

‘mastery’, but associating a hat’s creation with

garret – the only surviving example of a

obscurity and secrecy seems appropriate, for

workshop once common to the area.10 This

its processes were complicated, frequently foul

simple domesticity was retained in the

and often perilous. Even now hat-making has

architecture of the hat factories of the later

its dangers; a felt hat being moulded can fly off

nineteenth century. Hatworks were built that

its block, injuring anyone in its path.

could be converted to housing and in Australia,

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hats

4 Denton’s Hatworks,

Denton’s of Melbourne [4] – a nineteenth

going to work: ‘It began rather quietly as the

Melbourne, late 19th

century hatworks, named after Stockport’s

first few pairs of clogs stepped out of the

next-door rival – is now a chic apartment block.

doorways, then became louder as more people

The main two-or-more-storied building housed

joined in and louder still, until it was like a

offices, storage and the ‘finishing’ or ‘dry-side’

storm of hail, finally reaching a crescendo with

processes. This fronted a collection of

a simultaneous blast of whistles from all the

single-storey workshops housing the ‘wet-

mills; then … dying out until there was

side’: the preparation of the raw material and

absolute silence again’.11

century.

Below

the forming of the hat body. By late century

9780857851611_txt_app.indb 18

Stockport’s bricks, Bernstein says, were

when hatting had become more mechanized

dark with soot; Friederich Engels thought it

and thus centralized, housing was built near

‘one of the smokiest holes’ in the country.

the factory. Harry Bernstein, recalling his early

Textile mills dominated the town, but the tall

twentieth century Stockport childhood,

chimneystacks still to be seen in Stockport

describes a morning ‘symphony’ of people

(and Melbourne) testify to the importance of

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Hat-making, makers and pl aces

coal heat to hatting. The ‘bowing’, or

the English invented the process, and

separation of the fibres, was dirty work in

predictably, the English blame the French. At

unventilated conditions. Worse was the

all events, in the 1770s French hatters,

succeeding process of ‘planking’, where the fur

suspecting mercury to be the cause of the

or wool cone was shrunk to a hat-sized ‘hood’

tremors, madness and early death of too many

by repeated immersion in a ‘kettle’ of boiling

of their number, were suing their masters.

water, urine, spirit lees and sulphuric acid [5].

Papers were published on the topic in America

Then followed the blocking processes involving

and Britain, but the use of mercury was not

more heat and damp. Conditions in the dyeing

banned until 1912.

areas were little better. A journalist, visiting

French hatters were more combative than

Christys’ Southwark factory in 1841, found the

their British confrères. A hat in France

experience ‘uninviting to persons fastidious as

represented the sum of one man’s work; though

to cleanliness’.12 Gertie Halbort of Denton,

hatters worked in pairs they did not share the

recalling the early 1900s, described her father’s

labour. They were paid for what they made, not

hands on returning from work as ‘always

for what they did. Unalterable custom decreed

blistered … he used to burn strips of linen on a

that a hatter produce no more than two hats a

[hot] iron until it was like black oil and rubbed

day, or nine hats a week. ‘Secretage’, however,

all the tips of his fingers with it and that healed

could speed up the process to at least three

them for the next day’.13 The loss of fingerprints

hats a day, as a trial in Marseille in 1776

was commonplace.

proved, but the hatters would not budge.

Hatters however are better known for losing

Litigation and strikes rumbled on into the next

their minds; we still say someone is ‘mad as a

century, the masters constantly trying to

hatter’ – a phenomenon immortalized in Lewis

legitimize the process. Fashion calmed

Carroll’s Mad Hatter. Beaver fur, which

tempers when around 1800 the innocuous silk

produced the best weatherproof felt, required

top hat began to rival the beaver across

intensive cleansing. Most effective for both

Europe.

beaver and inferior furs, such as rabbit, was a

Any object dependent on the vagaries of

process known as ‘secretage’ or ‘carrotting’, in

fashion lives under threat: the flexible

which mercury salts diluted with nitric acid

architecture of hatworks took this into account.

broke down the fur’s oils to aid felting.

The freedoms of the earlier outwork system,

Research suggests that the danger lay less in

the fact that hatting was an elite craft – better

handling the fur than from inhaling mercury

paid than textile work – with its own traditions

fumes in the drying stages. The French claim

and rules, made hatters combative, resistant to

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hats

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Hat-making, makers and pl aces

change and to the subservience of the factory

for example, might be half an inch wider in the

5 Planking workshop,

system. The eighteenth century was a boom

country than in London and different again in

Hatters at Work,

time for men’s hats: three-cornered tricornes or

Wales. First in and last out of the workplace

two-cornered bicornes – initially known as

and something of a martinet, Davies knew how

‘cocked’ hats – dominated, and with conflicts

many hats a man could produce, and how long

in Europe there was a steady demand for

he took for lunch. But hatters with their ‘trade

military headgear in these two styles. By the

clubs’ have always tended to ‘combine’, and at

end of the century the bicorne was primarily

the end of the century Davies’s workers struck

military-wear and the tricorne had been

for better wages. With demand high, he urged

replaced by the round hat (also made of

his Stockport partner to settle but stoppages

beaver), part of a move toward simpler styles

continued, wages went on up and Davies

and worn in any number of ways – turned up at

fretted over ‘some very stale taper crowns’ and

front, back or side, high or low-crowned. A

the bad smell of the last batch.

profitable if unpublicized market was the slave

Penny Magazine, opposite

The vigilance Davies exercised over

trade; cheap felts were needed that could

production kept him solvent. But as

survive the voyage and be used as hats for

consumerism accelerated and expanded during

plantation workers. The end of this trade

the nineteenth century, as hats grew cheaper

coincided with that of the Napoleonic Wars and

and styles changed faster, the problems Davies

by the early 1800s, with the new top hats, the

had faced became more acute. The top hat was

felt-hat bubble burst and Stockport entered a

said to have caused a riot when first worn by

period of bitter dispute between hatters and

haberdasher John Hetherington (not the hat’s

employers.

inventor) in 1790, but by 1819 Lloyd’s Treatise

Thomas Davies had set up his hat business

1841.

on Hats featured no less than twenty-four

in Stockport in the 1770s, buying fur imports

named styles, most of which were versions of

from Liverpool, making the hat bodies in

the topper, though three – one appropriately

Stockport and sending them to be finished in

called ‘The Clericus’ – seem to be old-style

London. His letters 14 reiterate the need to

felts. Silk hats were safer to make, but in the

reduce costs to stay competitive, and for

second half of the century felt returned with

Stockport to respond swiftly to London

bowlers and soft felts: the Homburg, Fedora

fashions as well as those elsewhere. Bath, for

and Trilby. To meet demand the hat industry of

example, writes Davies, was ‘a very Tasty

the later nineteenth century needed machinery

Place’. His letters show how men’s fashion

and a cooperative workforce. Steam power was

depended on detail – the desired size of a brim,

applied to the separation of fibres in 1821 and

21

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hats

in the 1880s blowers replaced the dusty,

Luton and Straw 17

laborious ‘bowing’ process. The conformateur,

Women were certainly the key in the straw-hat

a metal contraption invented in the mid-

manufacturing town of Luton, to which a sector

nineteenth century, mapped the contours of

of the felt-hat industry shifted in the 1870s – it

the head and made fitting a more precise affair.

was a town where, it was said, ‘the women kept

Hatters, however, resisted innovation; those

the men’. Straw hats had been made in the

central noxious processes were not

South Midlands area of England for at least a

mechanized until the 1870s when machine

century before this; they are in fact the oldest

blocking led to a degree of mass production.

and commonest form of headgear. The role of a

Stockport’s newspapers recorded unrest in

hat, as we shall often see, can be symbolic,

the factories of the 1880s. Machines required

decorative or protective and straw hats, initially

less skill and employers tried to reduce wages,

protection against the sun, were associated

bringing in young, nonunion labour during

with rural labour. In Italy, however, the silky

stoppages. The disputes ended in the masters’

lustre of Tuscan straw plait ensured that Italian

favour – hats were cheap, trade was good but

straw hats were from the first desirable and

wages were not. Murray Posh, purveyor of

costly. By the seventeenth century fashionable

‘Posh’s 3-shilling hats’, in George Grossmith’s

ladies in Europe had discovered the allure of

Diary of a Nobody of 1891, gives Mr. Pooter ‘a

straw and Samuel Pepys, in the town of Hatfield

long but most interesting history of the

(a coincidence) near Luton, trying on straw

extraordinary difficulties of the manufacture of

hats, thought his wife quite lovely in hers.

cheap hats’.15 Such hats must have been quite

‘Paris, New York and Luton’: 18 these, the

robust, as Pooter’s son Lupin subjects his to a

historian John Dony wrote unblinkingly in 1942,

furious kicking. Even so, no one managed to

were the three centres of ladies’ hats. Luton has

feed fur into one end of a machine and have a

had a bad press over the years: ‘a long dirty

good hat come out at the other. The finishing of

market town’, wrote Arthur Young in the

hats cannot be mechanized. Women controlled

eighteenth century; a letter of 1850 to a local

this end of the process and a Stockport union

paper deplored ‘newly-built, ill-ventilated,

leader was reported as declaring that women

badly-drained cottages’; The Sunday Times of

‘held the key to the situation. When men and

1989 judged it ‘an easy place to have nothing to

women banded together, the latter were always

do with’.19 But for royal milliner Aage Thaarup,

staunch and true.’16 But mechanization did

Luton had ‘a special place in my heart’. 20 How

mean that Stockport no longer dominated the

did Luton find itself up there with Paris and

world of fashionable hats.

New York?

22

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Hat-making, makers and pl aces

Veronica Main, until 2015 curator of the

useful addition to the uncertain returns of

Luton Museum, explained to me that although

agricultural work. Leghorn still produced the

Luton was near London and in wheat-growing

most desirable straw and a Luton entrepreneur

country whose seasonal rhythms suited the

took out a patent in 1826 for the manufacture of

seasonal nature of hatting, communications

soi-disant ‘Tuscan Straw’. Clearly with some

were in fact poor and supplies of wheat straw,

success: Mrs. Bulstrode and her daughters, in

though good quality, were insufficient for the

George Eliot’s novel set in the 1830s,

amount of braid needed; Luton’s pre-eminence

Middlemarch, are criticized by neighbours for

in the straw-hat business lay in the cheapness

wearing modish ‘Tuscan Bonnets’ to church;

and availability of land. There was little or no

and in 1928, a very old lady recalled a Tuscan

property-hungry upper/middle class, the

bonnet bought at Gorringe’s department store

landowning aristocracy was largely absent and

in London seventy years before. 21

there were no building controls. The

from the countryside during the agricultural

T he I ndustry and I ts Premises

depression of the 1800s. For little capital outlay

The industry was divided into three types of

it was possible for an individual to buy land

business: ‘manufacturers’ in large warehouses

and set up a home-based business, making

and factories, ‘makers-up’ in smaller domestic

whole or part hats to be sold on to a factory or

units and ‘direct traders’ working

warehouse. The men blocked the hats while

independently and dealing directly with

women and children plaited and sewed – easily

retailers. 22 Most firms were family-based.

acquired skills that suited small fingers.

Luton’s homes, therefore, like Stockport’s,

abundance of land thus drew workers to Luton

Grown for the purpose in Tuscany and

doubled as workshops and plain domestic

exported as raw straw, plait or hat bodies from

design characterized the hat factories; still to

the northwestern port of Leghorn (hence

be seen in the streets of Luton or Dunstable,

‘Leghorn hats’), fine Italian grass-straw was

the workshops are indistinguishable from the

imported to the Midlands to supplement local

average nineteenth century townhouse [6].

straw during the eighteenth century. The

Only rear extensions (now garden sheds?)

Napoleonic Wars cut off supplies but with the

betray a building’s double life. Luton by 1850

help of French prisoners in local camps, who

was therefore a town characterized by a few

were particularly skilful braiders, local product

medium-sized manufacturers as well as a

improved. The plaits were taken to market and

teeming collection of independent small-scale

sold to bonnet sewers or manufacturers, a

units in those ‘ill-ventilated’ homes.

23

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hats

6 Nineteenth century

Architecturally nondescript but busy, the town

education, the schools disappeared. By 1893

Luton houses

embodied the values of a profit-bent, petit

imports from the Far East meant that only 5

bourgeoisie, resistant to outside authority.

percent of plait sold in Luton was local. But old

Culturally, politically and spiritually

habits die hard: ‘Miss Sexton of Hitchin …

nonconformist, Luton’s industry had no guilds,

could be seen just inside her doorway working

no unions, no recognized training.

at her plait as late as 1923’. 23

© Luton County Museum.

below

There were plaiting schools, however, where

9780857851611_txt_app.indb 24

This was a mobile trade and before

children crammed into unsanitary rooms under

mechanization, in the hat-making months of

the tutelage of barely literate women. Some

December to May, hundreds of young women

were more respectable than others, but all

crowded into Luton, lodging with families, to

demanded fees though there was little training

earn as much and as quickly as possible.

other than plaiting. Luton seems to have had

Sewing paid better than plaiting and these

comparatively few schools; with most of the

girls were mainly bonnet sewers, working in

town involved in the industry children learnt

factories or sewing rooms. A slightly dubious

plaiting at home and when the sewing process

air has always hung round the ‘mistery’ of

was mechanized, coinciding with the

hatting and assorted moralists considered the

introduction in 1870 of mandatory primary

girls disreputable. With a short season they

1/12/17 10:47 AM

Hat-making, makers and pl aces

7 19th century Straw Hats from Luton. © Luton County Museum.

worked long and late; reluctant to return to

girls in shawls and clogs and had no intention

their lodgings, spare time was spent out of

of clocking in at 9.00 am. They were paid by

doors – and single unattended females in

the piece, and if they chose to work all night

streets raise eyebrows. Such independence, so

and get up late, they would do so. Inspectors

the theory ran, made them unmarriageable;

argued that by working fewer hours the season

their spending power and links to fashion

would last longer. They were, as John Dony

stamped them as profligate and frivolous.

says, ‘undoubtedly wrong. A hat can only be

The Factory Acts of 1867 were designed to

Left

made as long as it is fashionable’: an

protect women workers, stipulating that they

observation that should have been set in stone

should be employed no more than twelve hours

over every hat business. The women prevailed,

a day: work could begin early but should finish

legislation was modified and with

by 8.00 pm. This did not suit the hatworkers of

mechanization these spirited bonnet sewers

Luton. Smartly dressed and in clean, creative

became resident well-paid machinists, even

work, they resented being classed with factory

factory owners.

25

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hats

cheap and could be hired or shared. As well as felts for men and women, there were straw toppers, boaters and their countless variations [7]. After mechanization the affordable boater became the century’s hat success story. In 1891 Mrs. Pooter trims ‘a little sailor hat’ for the seaside, though when Pooter [8] wears one ‘in the shape of a helmet worn in India only made of straw’, 24 his son refuses to be seen with him in public. Luton, like other hatting centres, had previously sold ladies’ hats unfinished, to be trimmed at home, in stores or workshops in London and the provinces. Hat making should not be confused with millinery, which is concerned with the finish and decoration of hats. Constance and Sophia Baines in Arnold Bennett’s Old Wives’ Tale (set in the 1870s) trim hats for the family drapery in provincial 8 Mr. Pooter’s helmet

M echani z ation

Bursley. Constance’s hands ‘had taken on the

from Diary of a

The arrival in Luton in the 1870s of a now

coarse texture which came from commerce

partly mechanized felt-hat industry meant

with needles, pins, artificial flowers’. 25 By the

work all the year round, in small factories

last decades of the century, however, with

rather than homes. At first hoods were bought

fast-changing, machine-made styles and with

from the northern towns for finishing, but

ornament given a new importance, Luton was

men’s hoods were unsuitable for the women’s

sending trimmed as well as plain hats not only

styles in which Luton specialized, so Italy

to London and Bursley but worldwide. As

became a principal supplier of fine felt forms.

dogsbody in a Copenhagen store in the 1920s,

From the 1870s until the First World War, Luton

Aage Thaarup, future royal milliner, recalled a

– and hatting everywhere – boomed.

storeroom full of hatboxes marked ‘Luton’. 26

Machinery for sewing straw plait was

Design became important but in Luton,

introduced from America in 1875 but did not

haphazard. Art and millinery schools were

kill home working as machines were small,

proposed but, being Luton, came to nothing.

Nobody, 1891.

Above

26

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Hat-making, makers and pl aces

Improved transport and the development of its

a week. Aage Thaarup said apprentices spent

millinery side did however bring Luton closer

‘one year making tea, one year going to the

to London’s fashion centre and milliners

post office, one year sewing headbands’. 27

divided their skills between the two. Luton’s

They worked and ate at tables in cellars, a

preferences for piecework and autonomy suited

forewoman overseeing each table. Mary Quant

the culture of the West End ateliers – places

remembers getting high on glue from hats in a

that to this day are not unionized.

1950s workshop, little different from the workshop of London’s grandest milliner in 1970

M illiners : London and Paris

where designer Wendy Edmonds worked. She

Hatters made men’s hats – but, as tailors made

twenty girls sat round tables with tiny

ladies’ riding habits, so hatters made their

workspaces for each. There was no protection

riding hats. Millinery establishments, initially

from the gas rings and steamers or from the

run by men in the seventeenth century, were by

heady stench of glue. The pressure to work fast

the eighteenth century staffed by women for a

was relentless but so was the demand for

mainly female clientele. As well as selling the

perfection and fingers became raw. 28

haberdashery for which Milan was famous, by

describes an unventilated basement into which

The millinery workroom and shop described

the 1830s milliners were selling gloves, hats,

by Fanny Burney in her novel of 1814, The

bonnets and trimmings; women’s and

Wanderer, where her heroine, Elinor, slaves for

children’s dresses were also stocked until

poor rewards was ‘a whirl of hurry, bustle and

about 1900, after which millinery was

loquacity and interruptions … the goods which

exclusively a matter of hats. Mid-nineteenth

required most work, most ingenuity and most

century work conditions for milliners in

hands were last paid’. Customers go about in

London’s West End were horrific: a fifteen-hour

‘unpaid plumes’, but Elinor has little sympathy

day was standard, twenty-two hours when

for the milliners whose ‘notions of probity were

demand was high; girls slept at their benches

as lax as those of their customers … old goods

and fire was a constant risk. A century later

were sold as new, cheap goods as if dear’. 29

little had changed. Shirley Hex – the brilliant,

Burney records the workroom’s jealous pecking

creative milliner and generous mentor to some

order and Wendy Edmonds recalls similar

of today’s finest British hatmakers – recalls

hierarchies: juniors could rise to assistant

working as an apprentice in London’s West End

milliner or machinist, and, with luck, to

in 1947, picking up pins, shopping for

forewoman or chief milliner. But a worker might

trimmings, buying buns and making tea for £1

be in the same ill-paid job for forty years. Chief

27

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hats

9 Edgar Degas, ‘At

milliners were given the best, most complex

the Milliners’, France,

hats but advancement was difficult – to design

suggested that a man in a milliner’s shop was

a hat, you usually had to own the business.

not just shopping. Sexual connotations dogged

Lilly Daché’s key step to becoming milliner to

the millinery trade, but recent research by Amy

Hollywood and New York society was her

Erikson indicates that despite such aspersions

purchase of a hat shop. Chanel began as a

– notably from a popular trade guide – it was

milliner; it was when a lover bought her a shop

unlikely ‘that the risk of seduction … was any

in 1912 that her career took off.

greater among millinery apprentices than in

1882.

Opposite

By the 1930s designer millinery was also

Eighteenth century popular imagery

any other group’; as Erikson says, ‘the

being sold, with rather dubious claims for

association between commercial exchange and

exclusivity, in high-end department stores in

sexual promiscuity when women are involved

Europe and America. Tatiana du Plessix, an

… is of extremely long-standing’. 31 In 1781 in

émigré milliner, employed by Saks of New York

Richard Sheridan’s play School for Scandal, the

during the 1950s, is remembered by her

libertine Joseph Surface refers archly to his

daughter at a table ‘heaped high with rolls of

‘little French milliner’. A century later, Beatrice

felt, reams of tulle and veiling and lamé …

French, trying to earn a living as milliner in

grosgrain, ribbons … bouquets of aigrette and

George Gissing’s novel The Year of Jubilee, is

peacock feathers and lavish pink roses, the

confronted by the censorious Mrs. Damerel:

whole lovely heap surmounted by the large

‘Miss French, I believe you are engaged in

steam press that will force felt and straw to

some kind of millinery business. This excuses

take on their ultimate shape of Bretons,

you for ill manners.’ Deploring national decline,

boaters, casques, berets … at the head mother

she wails, ‘Now we have women of title

sits, sculpting velours, draping organza or

starting as milliners!’32 – clear reference to

satin’.

30

This lovely heap was sadly a Bonfire of

Lady Duff Gordon, the very successful ‘Lucile’.

Vanities-in-Waiting when in the failing hat

Even now, Shirley Hex and Wendy Edmonds

market of 1965 Tatiana was ruthlessly fired.

recall continual assumptions of their sexual

However, in Tom Llewellyn’s two airy rooms up

availability when apprentices.

a narrow street in Luton, there are happily ‘lovely heaps’ of ribbons, feathers and tulle to

T he H at Zenith

transform felt and straw into beautiful hats.

The decades at the turn of the twentieth

Privileged to watch the milliners at work, I saw

century were Europe’s great Hat Moment – not

fashion hats destined for London showrooms as

only for those who wore hats, but also for those

well as neat felts for Dutch Railway personnel.

who made and sold them and for the places

28

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Hat-making, makers and pl aces

29

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hats

10 Nineteenth

where this happened. In 1900 Luton boasted no

item of respectable attire, helped, as we see in

century hats, Lloyds

less than five hundred hatters; by the same

a pastel from New York’s Metropolitan Museum

date over 10,000 were employed in Stockport’s

[9], by a neatly dressed sales girl. A woman is

hatting after Christys’ moved there. But still –

gravely considering herself in a flowery bonnet

hats mean Paris; as the Cole Porter song goes

before a mirror that partly hides the girl, who

– ‘If a Harris Pat means a Paris Hat – OK’.

holds two plumed hats. This is not erotic, not

Treatise on Hats. Opposite

Ruth Iskin, writing on Impressionism and nineteenth century consumer culture,

33

gives

Edgar Degas’ millinery pictures a central place

the sexual frenzy described in Zola’s novel, but a proper female wish for suitable headgear. The extent to which Degas foregrounds hats

in the imagery of Paris. These works were part

is striking. He situates the viewer as customer

of a discourse about mass consumption to

and shows the milliner’s work close-up as a

which Emile Zola’s novel of 1883, The Ladies’

delicate, painstaking craft, satisfying but hard.

Paradise, contributed. The expanded retail

At the start of this chapter we encountered

sectors of late nineteenth century cities, as

Virginia Woolf’s Rezia saying hats mattered,

well as offering women an independent leisure

and for her shell-shocked husband, Septimus,

activity, provided jobs. Doubts however were

her millinery is his ‘refuge’: ‘coloured beads …

raised about the moral and physical welfare of

buckram shapes … feathers, spangles, silks,

both shopper and shop girl. Women working,

ribbons’. The last sane thing he does is make a

selling and walking unattended in public

hat for a customer: ‘He began putting odd

spaces raised disquiet. Set in a Paris

colours together, for though he could not even

department store, Zola’s novel presents the

do up a parcel, he had a wonderful eye … “She

store’s display of hats as a place of perdition, of

shall have a beautiful hat!” he murmured.’35 In

frenzied erotic desire.

fin de siècle New York, Lily Bart, in Edith

Degas’ studies of women making, selling

Wharton’s novel House of Mirth, spinning down

and buying hats are usually seen, as Iskin

the social ladder towards catastrophe,

notes, ‘within a late 19th century Parisian

struggles to trim a hat in a milliner’s fetid

mythology about modistes as sexually

workroom, believing that all she needs is good

available women’.

34

But no top hats lurk as they

taste. Lily’s failure ends in her dismissal,

do around his ballet girls. Modistes, like other

crushed by the alluring object that had once

ill-paid women, might well have supplemented

graced her head. Hats are volatile; they are not,

their income in this way, but that is not Degas’

as Stephen Jones observed, always amenable

subject. Stylish bourgeois ladies are shown

to control; they can be beautiful but can both

absorbed in the business of choosing a central

inflict and suffer defeat.

30

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Hat-making, makers and pl aces

31

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hats

T he Topper

of civilization’. 36 Willis had first worked in

The Impressionists’ light-filled vision of late

publishing and when he started at the hatter’s

nineteenth century Paris and its fashionable

in Blackfriars the anarchy that reigned was a

women is punctuated by the sharp notes of

dramatic contrast to the staid world of books:

black silk toppers – fragile objects of

‘The men worked without supervision … every

remarkable durability [10]. They filled the

man was a law unto himself … the master

interregnum 1810 to 1870 between the beaver

never entered the shop for the purpose of

and the hard felt bowler, and though starting

wielding authority ... [they] worked on the

as a high fashion item, quickly became

piece-work principle and conducted

ubiquitous as an expression of social aspiration

themselves … as if they were working on their

and in a thriving old-clothes market enjoyed

own account.’ They smoked, talked and sang,

many further lives. During the second half of

and because they worked in high temperatures

the century until the First World War, topper

wore singlets, old trousers and aprons. The

and bowler cohabited – though they were not

hatter’s reputation for eccentricity was not

interchangeable, the bowler then became city

always the result of mercury poisoning: Willis

wear and the top hat ceremonial and festive

recalls their appearance outside the premises

wear. The cloth cap – with or without a visor

in coats and top hats over vests and dirty

– was the workingman’s hat but, translated to

trousers. A certain Charlie Webb, disliking

the countryside in the late century, became

workshop facilities, could be seen going up

sportswear for the upper classes. In

Blackfriars Road to the nearest public lavatory

comparison to the noxious process that

‘in a smart overcoat, shiny topper over a

produced felt hats, making a top hat was

deplorable pair of ragged trousers and old boots

relatively innocuous. Frederick Willis, a London

tied up with string’. 37

hatter working in the manufacturing and retail

As we have seen the ‘closed shop’ had

sides of London’s hat trade, wrote a delightful

driven hatters out of London to nonunionized

account of working with toppers in their

places like Denton and Stockport, but tradition

turn-of-the-century heyday.

lingered on among London’s hatters. Willis

He tells us that the first top hat was the

calls them trade union pioneers: tied to no one

direct descendant of the old English beaver,

firm, every London hatter, bar one, in 1890 was

too heavy for modern use. Around 1800 the

unionized. The union-controlled

French improved it by covering it in silk plush

apprenticeships and piecework rates were fixed

and ‘it was the combination of French elegance

irrespective of hours worked. The situation was

and English stability that made it the emblem

not unlike that of those obstinate French

32

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Hat-making, makers and pl aces

hatters – each man worked at his own pace

and remodelled and discuss next season’s hat.

11 ‘Chapellerie May’,

producing as much as he chose; differing

The hatter’s sense of autonomy, of belonging to

Loches, France,

payments troubled no one. The men came and

an elite that created objects beyond commerce

went whenever they pleased and organized

and inhabited a world far from mass production,

meals for themselves. The ‘master’ however

was reflected in the shops that sold and

had absolute authority in the office and

serviced the hats. Discretion, not display, was

warehouse, could lay off labour when he chose

the rule: ‘The symbolic silk hat, the only object

and was entitled to reject faulty work. He had

in the hatter’s window, had been brushed and

no obligation other than to pay, the worker

glossed and polished like a cat prepared for a

none other than to produce good work.

show at Olympia.’39 Willis remembers a hatter

Willis emphasizes the labour intensiveness

2014.

Below

whose favourite window display of a black silk

of hatting: ‘all the best people had their hats

topper, a light grey and an opera hat resting on

made to measure’, 38 and every stage was by

three white boxes, was considered flashy. These

hand. The ‘best people’ not only had hats made

shops were ostensibly open to all, ‘but the

to measure but returned to have them cleaned

vulgar never crossed the threshold’. 40

33

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hats

12 Lock & Co. of London.

Below

9780857851611_txt_app.indb 34

Perhaps because France is the spiritual

makes a decent living, adding scarves and

home of hats – or is less elitist – many French

bags to his hats. He has a conformateur, though

towns still have their chapelleries. The city of

it’s been a while since he used it, he says, and

Tours has a nineteenth century hat shop as

displays a ‘gibus’ (a collapsible opera hat) that

well as a new one where two sisters make and

still gives a smart ‘claque’ when flicked.

sell hats. ‘Chapellerie May’ [11] has existed in

Fred Willis in his later career worked as a

the centre of the neighbouring small town of

hatter in London’s St. James’s area, in the kind

Loches since 1850. The present owner

of shop ‘the vulgar’ never entered. One of these

inherited it from his mother who had it from a

shops, ‘Lock & Co., Hatter’, still exists in St.

modiste who since 1930 had trimmed and sold

James’s Street, and is not very different from

hats. The shop has changed very little, with

‘Chapellerie May’. Small, old-fashioned, with

rough wooden floors, oak counters and shelves

the hatter’s plant and tools at the back, and

lining the walls. To the right of the door the

‘white boxes on which were stencilled some of

hats were once blocked and trimmed; to the

the most famous names in England’41 on

left was the shop. Storage was at the back and

wooden shelves round the walls. In Paris, New

above, a two-room flat. The present owner

York or Luton, hat businesses have since their

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Hat-making, makers and pl aces

nineteenth century heyday come and gone like

dealing only with those who met their exigent

summer rain, but Lock’s of St. James’s endures

standards. The business was therefore relatively

[12]. George James Lock first leased his shop in

untouched by fluctuating fortunes and labour

1686 and succeeding generations retained it,

unrest – as the affable young man in Lock’s

finally buying the premises in 1913, where a

remarked, ‘there are not a lot of strikes in St.

Lock still remains in charge. There is

James’s’. This young man turned down a

something in the Lock personality, the family

university place to work at Lock’s – evidence of

historian suggests, a mixture of the canny city

managerial astuteness. Familiar with Lock’s

merchant and innate gentleman that being so

history, he can curl a brim, restore a nap and sell

finely tuned to the place it inhabits, succeeds.

a hat. ‘It is the intimate knowledge of the goods

Only once, when a Lock overdid the gentleman

he sells which distinguishes the true hatter from

at the expense of the merchant, was the

the mere hat-seller’, Frank Whitbourn, the family

business at risk.

historian says. Though part of a Heritage

If objects dependent on fashion live always

Industry, Lock’s is not a museum. ‘It is

under threat, at Lock’s the hat has soared

historically interesting not simply because it is

beyond fashion into the empyrean to achieve

old but because it still works … part of an

immortality. Rightly or wrongly, women are

ancient, satisfactory pattern of keeping shop.’42

held accountable for fashion’s whims –

Hats and the places and people for whom hats

especially millinery ones – and until recently

were the fabric of life, were heading for crisis in

Lock’s clientele has been male. Men’s hats are

mid-twentieth century. But that intimate

heavy with significance and symbol. But this

knowledge, those astute family genes, kept

does not mean that Lock’s ignored fashion –

Lock’s in business. George James Lock,

they created the iconic bowler, as well as the

acquiring the leasehold of the St. James’s Street

exquisite grey Ascot. Lock’s hats, fashioned

property, apprenticing himself to a hatter and

with a distinct clientele in view, embodied

marrying his daughter, showed singular

Beau Brummell’s ideal that a man’s quality is

foresight. With gentlemen’s clubs, St. James’s

shown not by the mode he adopts but by the

Palace and London’s West End nearby, the shop

cut, material and workmanship of his apparel.

was always smart. Small, awkward and dark, it

Finishing, trimming, blocking and repair

still draws Thackeray’s ‘people of fascination’

took and still takes place behind and above the

through its doors. Not long after marrying her

shop. Lock’s bought hoods first from

prince, the Duchess of Cambridge, whose

Bermondsey, then from Stockport and Spain,

fashion choices can clear shelves in minutes,

but they depended on no single supplier,

was sporting a Lock’s hat.

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2 hats and power

F

or certain sections of society the symbolic role of the hat is extremely important, trumping considerations such as protection or fashion. As far as royalty, the clergy and the military

are concerned their headgear forms a vitally communicative part of their public image. In these social areas both wearer and spectator can have fixed ideas about what should or should not be worn and elaborate codes have been established with (often dubious) links to tradition. Even when there is no overt acknowledgement of the role of head-covering there are usually unconscious assumptions that such-and-such a piece of headgear will command respect, indicate allegiance or convey sanctity. We start this chapter by looking at the ways the British monarchy, in covering its head, navigated these demands.

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U neasy H eads

one hand a hat’s function is close to that of a

‘All I want is peace and quiet and a little fun

uniform – almost a mark of office, like a crown

and here I am tied down to this life he said

or a helmet. It is worn because it is ‘correct’ for

taking off his crown being royal has many

some public event. But a hat, as opposed to a

painful drawbacks’,1(sic) Bertie, Prince of Wales

crown, also brings with it modernity – it is part

says to Mr. Salteena in Daisy Ashford’s The

of a personal image at a particular time. Like all

Young Visiters. Crown, bonnet or a hat from

of us, royalty want to wear hats they like, that

Lock’s – a hat is the least necessary element of

fit their idea of self. Along with these two

clothing but also the most powerful. ‘Of all the

factors a third comes crucially into play:

gewgaws that Policy found to fix the bonds

fashion. Monarchs can choose whether or not to

more firmly on the Ruled, nothing served its

follow fashion; they can even set one. It can

purpose better than a hat’, concludes the

seem ridiculous to wear the latest thing, but

historian Michael Harrison. ‘Call it a crown,

worse to wear an outdated one. Decisions have

2

call it a tiara … it is still a hat.’ When Mrs.

to be made about hats, and whatever the

Thatcher went to Russia to meet Gorbachev,

decision, the result is a public spectacle. Steve

Philip Somerville made her a huge black fox fur

Lane, royal hat-block-maker, described to me

hat. The impact was dramatic and the press

how proposed styles pass through planners,

glowing. Politician or monarch, all need

designers, dressers and then the Queen herself,

imposing accessories to hide their mere

before a choice is made. There is much to tie a

mortality, and though I deal with hats rather

monarch down.

than crowns in what follows, crowns, even when removed, haunt royal heads. ‘This matter of hats’, Frederick Willis wrote

Royal M en The story of royal hats begins effectively with

in 1960 (just as they were vanishing), ‘is a very

the Hanoverians, who, as Linda Colley says,

important one … Remove the policeman’s

wanted to promote ‘the deeply appealing myth

helmet and you destroy his authority … Abolish

that members of the royal family were just like

the bank messenger’s silk hat and you aim a

everyone else yet at the same time different’4

blow at the heart of British finance.’3 Willis’s

– ordinary but magical. There had been a

apocalyptic vision followed a lifetime with hats,

dramatic precedent to this shift in royal

but until quite recently hats were objects of

imagery, however, in 1660 when Charles II,

strong hierarchic, economic and even religious

restored to power after the Commonwealth,

implication, ruled by stern etiquette. For

removed his hat as he rode into the city of

royalty, various factors come into play. On the

London, dispensing with any sense of mystic

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hats and power

bicornes, plain, plumed or braided. Charles’ hat

13 Entry of Charles II,

people. Protocol demanded that only the King

here is the earlier cavalier hat. Tricornes and

1660.

might retain his hat in company, but for the

bicornes, adopted successively by European

occasion Charles carried his modestly plumed

and North American military in the eighteenth

beaver in one hand [13]. From the sixteenth

century, became preferred royal headgear,

century to the advent of the nineteenth century

particularly in Northern Europe.

apartness and emphasizing service to his

top hat and bowler, European men of status wore such dark beaver felts, tricornes and

Below

George III instituted the Windsor uniform in 1779 – a red and gold trimmed blue coat and

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tricorne – for himself and his court. But he also liked surprising his subjects by wearing bourgeois dress and a plain felt hat; he was in fact very much in tune with the movement toward plainer dress. He could switch codes rather more skilfully than French monarchs. Philip Mansel has argued in his book Dressed to Rule how the lack of martial spirit in French royal dress damaged its image. In general, high-ranking hats were distinguished from others by amounts of braid, cockades and feathers. Feathers indeed play a quite disproportionate part in the story – monarchy is also a kind of show business. George IV, unlike his father, was uninhibited about gilt and plumes, as evinced in designs for his coronation. The Prince’s bouffant coiffure (actually a wig 5 ) meant he was rarely seen in a hat, but the top hat sitting by him in Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of 1822 [14] testifies to his awareness of fashion.

Royal Women Before women entered the public arena of streets, shops and parks in the mid-eighteenth century, female headgear was mainly a matter of caps indoors and hoods outside. On horseback, however, elite women sported masculine hats from an early date. Less fettered than men by hats as symbols of rank and power, women had more freedom to invent headgear. It was Marie Antoinette – or more accurately her modiste, Rose Bertin – who

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14 Thomas

effectively launched the fashion hat with a

daguerreotype and was so shocked by the

panache that has since rarely been rivalled.

result that she personally deleted her head and

Lawrence. George IV, 1822.

Opposite

Charlotte, George III’s queen, did not follow

hat. Poke bonnets certainly did her no favours.

suit, though she did adopt the French queen’s

On a visit to Paris in 1855, her huge white

15 Queen Victoria’s

ostrich plumes into court headdress – a

bonnet loaded with feathers and streamers and

cap, ca.1880. Below

tradition surviving until 1939. Horace Walpole

reticule embroidered with a poodle (a

noted Charlotte’s pretty little tiara, and judging

compliment to her hosts?), amazed the

from portraits she disliked big millinery

Parisians.

gestures. Women’s headgear can be inventive but also problematic, sending unwanted signals. Lawrence’s portrait of Charlotte in 1790 conveys a troubled melancholy that owes something to the knots of black ribbon scattered over the ageing queen’s cloud of silver hair – ornaments the artist chose. Mrs. Papendiek, Keeper of the Queen’s Wardrobe, records Charlotte making ‘difficulties’ about the headdress and refusing to sit for Lawrence.6 Charlotte hated the portrait and George furiously rejected it, considering her bared head a breach of protocol. Though a magnificent painting, something has gone wrong here in the juggling of private and public parameters, but the ornament tells more of Charlotte and her woes than she knew. With enough embellishment and a competent painter, royalty could usually ensure an imposing image, but with photography all was terribly changed. Although portrait photographs can be retouched, royalty was to become victim to the snapshot. Queen Victoria sat for a

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Albert resorted to uniform, but how was Victoria to reconcile fashion – to which she

[16]. They were not cheap – at her first

16 The Prince (later

milliner’s bill she cried, ‘Heaven forgive me for

King Edward VII) &

9

was not indifferent – with the dignity of office?

such extravagance!’ The fashion industry

Fate intervened and widowhood gave her a

readily did so.

uniform: white caps and streamers over black

Happily for Edward’s rotundity, English

crepe suited her and her expanding girth

tailoring was then at its best; the top hat lent

admirably [15]. If it lacked style and glamour,

him height, elegance and gravitas. Uniform

the garb was thrifty and comfortable and made

multiplied with the duties of Empire and

her a national symbol for the values of

ceremonial headgear sprouted plumes, of

historical continuity. But our notion of fashion

which he took full advantage. He introduced

Princess of Wales 1882.

Opposite

17 Edward VII in a Homburg.

Below

includes that of change, and Victoria’s image – a tea-cosy topped by a ribbon-knot – did come to seem remote and unimpressive.

Fashion Icons Beautiful, stylish Princess Alexandra stepped in. She and Edward – then Prince of Wales – Jane Ridley says in her biography of the Prince, ‘performed the ornamental public role which Victoria declined.… had the social functions of the monarchy fallen into disuse, Queen Victoria’s position would have been barely tenable’.7 The pair were sociable, fashionable and good at hats, though height may have been a worry. As Valerie Cumming says, ‘however much the Hanovers try to strengthen the line with tall handsome partners … the throne is invariably occupied by a small monarch’. 8 Hats edged out bonnets later in the nineteenth century and flowers and feathers swamped millinery, but Alexandra cleverly avoided excess. She chose instead small bonnets or boaters that sat coquettishly on her coiffure

9780857851611_txt_app.indb 43

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‘Well, sir’, the poor man pleaded, ‘you don’t have to go about in buses.’ ‘Buses!’ Edward barked, ‘Nonsense!’10 Edward’s niece, Princess Patricia of Connaught, clearly had a mind of her own. Kensington Palace has Princess Pat’s tiny coronet in which she looks chic if slightly irreverent [18]. It should have prepared her family for further gestures of dissent when she married a commoner. Princess May, the future Queen Mary, also distanced herself from the frivolous, fashionable court. Serious and shy, she identified with Queen Charlotte, favouring simple hats with tufts of feathers, worn high on the head, like a crown. It was a style introduced by Alexandra but turned by Mary into a timeless majestic uniform. Her signature toque in a royal line-up for the Jubilee of 1935 [19] transcends fashion – a contrast to the elegant mistake obscuring the Duchess of Kent’s face, or the Duchess of York’s already feathery choice. Mary tried to ban feathers at Presentations, but George V was punctilious 18 Princess Patricia

the Homburg [17], established the bowler for

and palace life, according to Chips Channon,

of Connaught, 1901.

city wear, spiting a trade journal’s anti-bowler

still involved ‘much preening and plumes’.11

Above

campaign, and he startled society by wearing

Relations between Alexandra and Mary

it with a tailcoat, continental fashion. The royal

were not close, but they seem to have come to

pair successfully orchestrated the uniform

some sort of hat truce – an agreement to down

function, the self-expressive function and the

hats, as it were. Queen Mary and her lady in

play with fashion. But if innovative himself,

waiting, Lady Cynthia Colville, were due for tea

Edward was a stickler for protocol in others.

with Alexandra at Sandringham. Lady Cynthia

When he spotted his Master of the Household

records putting on her ‘country-best’ coat and

entering the Palace in a bowler, he exploded.

hat for the ten-minute walk to the Big House.

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hats and power

Mary suddenly appeared, and said, ‘But you can’t go in a hat!’ The Queen was dressed ‘as for a party, and hatless’. Lady Cynthia tore off

writes, ‘and concluded she must have left his

19 Royal Jubilee, 1935.

13

Imperial Majesty behind in England.’

Below

Ironically, among modern monarchs it was

her hat and, after a stately carriage drive,

the uncrowned Edward VIII who took the

Alexandra met them in a superb tea gown,

liveliest interest in headgear and its

equally hatless. Lady Cynthia, bemused in

implications. He claimed to have had no great

tweeds and messy hair, concluded she had

fondness for hats, and ‘landed hatless by air’14

been initiated into some arcane ‘appareling

for his father’s funeral – which would have

necessities for Royal tea’.12

infuriated the king. But in fact he set as many hat fashions as his grandfather. When he

‘Daylight on the M agic’

sported a golfing cap, caps became the rage,

George V, retiring and averse to fashion,

and when he wore a beret, they sold out. The

ordered similar suits year after year – a

blue bowler he launched did not catch on, ‘nor

monotony occasionally leavened by a slightly

did the straw boater’, he adds rather

different hat. Thrift did not serve him well at

endearingly, ‘which with fortunes of the Luton

the Delhi Durbar of 1911. Short and slight, he

straw hat industry in mind, I made determined

entered Delhi on a small horse, followed by

efforts to revive’.15

Mary, for once tremendously plumed. In his

‘It’s all right for the men’, observed Steve

helmet and uniform, he looked no grander than

Lane. ‘A hat and feathers and some medals and

an average general. ‘The crowds looked at the

they’re away.’16 But after the Russian

Queen in all her glory’, Jessica Douglas Home

revolution, a world war and the realities of

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20 Royal Family,

service dress, this looked perilously Ruritanian.

when Elizabeth in crinolines and picture hats

1948.

Even when aiming for bourgeois normality in

swept across the national scene in wartime,

21 Queen Elizabeth

civilian dress, royal males seemed to fade into

Edward VIII became a blip in the beneficent

II.

a fossilized world. But Edward, though slight,

feminization of the monarchy. Designer

had style; with film-star looks and a chic

Norman Hartnell and Aage Thaarup, her

mistress he seemed accessible and modern.

milliner, transformed the royal image. ‘Why do

Had he become king he would perhaps have

I love feathers?’ Thaarup says, ‘partly because

enlivened headgear and delighted hatters. It

of their royal and historical associations …

was difficult, at all events, for George VI, built

men have used them too, but their appeal is

on the same lines as his brother but deeply shy,

essentially feminine’.17 Femininity was the

not to appear a pale alternative.

essence of Elizabeth’s appeal; unlike the

below

Opposite

Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon rescued them all

Duchess of Kent’s simple elegance, it was an

from the 1936 Abdication crisis, re-creating

old-fashioned, fluffily decorative allure.

royal style and making it fashionable. Matters

Against all supposed fashion rules she

of dress and millinery may seem minor, but

shortened her already small size with loaded

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hats,18 creating fairy-tale glamour in a harshly modern world. Everything in the dismal 1970s seemed old and ugly, a journalist wrote, except the Queen Mother.19 Like many pretty mothers of adolescent daughters, Elizabeth dressed her daughter as if middle-aged. Apart from height, the two were physically unalike and it was some years before the present Queen escaped her mother’s style [20]. The Queen takes her symbolic presence seriously and issues of visibility seem to have been behind her long refusal to wear brims. She probably felt justified in this on a visit to America in 1991, when, after a speech by President Bush, she stood at a microphone that no one had thought to adjust. Television captured nothing but a hat brim and a cameraman’s wail – ‘All I’ve got is a talking hat!’ It is in the Trooping of the Colour tricorne and the Garter Knight’s plumes that the Queen looks easiest and most royal. And Princess Diana’s playful take on military hat styles in the 1980s may have given food for thought. At all events, when viewing fifty years of royal hats at the Diamond Jubilee of 2012, the French journal Le Figaro concluded the Queen had found her style in the ‘chevalier’ – essentially the plumed beaver, sported by powerful women from Tudor times onward. With its commanding quills [21], this hat sails happily through all the ‘nice and pretty events’ (in Walter Bagehot’s phrase) now required of royalty. It conforms to that

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tendency for royal headgear to become fixed

metaphorically but actually painful, had two

and emblematic; Shirley Hex, who made many

padded coronets made for his daughters at his

early royal hats, regrets that there seems now

coronation. There is a religious aspect to the

to be only one hat … semper eadem. How

crowning of a king: the crown, placed by Pope

future royals will navigate the shoals between

or archbishop on a monarch’s anointed head, is

high fashion and dignity of office is an

deliberately burdensome, symbolizing the

interesting question. ‘Does one want the future

assumption of sacred duties, shared by family

Queen of England to be fashionable?’ milliner

and peers. As Napoleon knew when he took his

Stephen Jones asked after the 2012 Jubilee.

crown from the Pope and put it on his own

‘No. You want her to look like a princess.’ And

head, only the Church could challenge royal

what about princes? In fact it’s not – as Steve

authority. Only the Pope has three crowns.

Lane said – ‘all right for the men’. Royal women

When a prelate becomes cardinal the Pope,

since Alexandra have fashioned successful

metaphorically speaking, sends him his hat.

styles of their own, juggling the mark of office,

The papal tiara, the cardinal’s hat and the

the personal statement and the gesture to

bishop’s mitre function as emblems of power

fashion in ways that have suited them, with a

rather than hats, and, like crowns, feature in

creative freedom denied to men. If soldiering is

crests and coats of arms, on pub signs and

not your métier – then what is a royal male to

monuments.

do for hats? Being royal still has drawbacks.

Information on clerical headgear is, however, elusive. Ecclesiastical dress needs to

Sacred H ats

be seen within a social context, but because it

Crowns and royal hats have much in common

is slow to change writers note oddities rather

with ecclesiastical millinery when performing

than everyday appearances. For the clergy

official duties. They are intended to impress,

themselves, dress was not officially considered

show authority and power and command

an important part of their ministry, and in the

respect. They can signal when the wearer is on

post-Reformation church of Britain little was

or off-duty; but, as we quickly come to

prescribed; the clergy altered or omitted items

understand when we move to clerical gear,

as they felt the need. Although clerical wear

their indication of official (or officiating) status

was deliberately distinctive, it was not uniform

may involve disputes over correctness. Clerical

in the military sense.

headgear is often awkward to wear, though rarely as awkward as crowns. George VI, aware that crowns are not just

Much ecclesiastical dress looks impressive because of its origins in the ancient world. The Pope’s magnificent crown began as the plain

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Phrygian cap of Greece. In Rome hats were not

emotive significance, as often happens when

worn other than the broad-brimmed petasus or

dress is regulated. Elizabeth simply wanted

the brimless, close-fitting pileus for travel or

the clergy in ‘distinct habits’; the cap had no

outdoor work. These two styles became,

‘holy’ meaning, no link to Catholic ritual, but

respectively, the Roman Catholic cardinal’s hat

the association was made, and Puritans

and the biretta; the latter became the square

furiously objected, insisting instead on the

cap of both pre- and post-Reformation clerics.

beaver felt. The argument was defused when

The most enduring piece of church headgear

Puritans left the established Church and the

has been the mitre, granted to Catholic

square cap remained.

prelates by the Pope, in Protestant Britain

In the Catholic Church the higher clergy

given to bishops by the monarch. Like the

wear headgear during services; in Protestant

papal tiara, it started as a plain white conical

canon law ‘no man shall cover his head in

cap, but grew two horns; as with the tiara,

church or chapel, except he have some

shape and ornament had no liturgical

infirmity’. In both churches women’s heads

significance. My concern with Roman Catholic

were covered. As one can imagine, for clergy

headgear (a rich topic) is however here limited

and congregation the switches in Tudor

to the models it provided for the developing

England between Catholicism and

Anglican church in Britain: models followed

Protestantism, the upheavals of the Civil War

or resisted.

and the Puritan Interregnum, caused not only

The hood and square cap constituted the

spiritual but sartorial worries. Previously,

canonical headgear of the English Catholic

churches had been much like town squares

clergy. The hood was no longer functional,

where – hatted – one walked and talked as

though it had been useful in chilly churches.

well as worshipped; men in hats stroll and

Janet Mayo points out that in England

chat in the churches of seventeenth century

canonical vestments as they were at the

Dutch art. But when Pepys in the 1670s noted

Reformation are important ‘since it is these

that there were objections to hats in church,

that were adopted as liturgical dress when the

lines were clearly being drawn. The

old order went’.

20

They became a source of

introduction of a married clergy meant that

anxiety even when of no further religious

clergymen had another social status (the

import. In 1559 a bishop, nervously asking for

parish priest was now also a family man and

advice, was told caps were fine but the surplice

demanded respect as such). The question of

was papist. When the Queen ruled that the

whether and why Christians wore hats then

clergy wear square caps, they acquired an

became more problematic.

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Quakers

added to thine’. 22 Charles’s mildness defused

22 1720 engraving of

For Quakers hats became the focus of dissent,

the situation – and Penn was right: the hat in

Quakers.

legal action and even violence. A hat marks a

question, Puritan, Quaker or cavalier, was in

man’s status and allows the giving and

essence the same dark beaver felt with

receiving of what is known as ‘hat honour’: on

variations in height, width and ornament.

the head, it denotes self-respect; when doffed,

Quakers and Puritans emigrated to North

respect for others. George Fox, the founding

America and the black hats worn by Congress

Quaker, declared in his ‘Propositions’ that it

in the early years of independence may be

was unlawful for Christians to uncover their

vestiges of those passionate principles.

heads: ‘he that boweth and uncovereth his

Fox disapproved of female hats entirely,

head, what hath he reserved to the Creator?’

especially with brims, but women’s heads, St.

Only pride demands hat honour, he said.

Paul said, had to be covered. After some

Quakers were beaten up and prepared to be

skirmishes Quaker women settled for drab

arrested rather than raise their hats. This

linen bonnets tied under the chin and these,

passionate dissent came of muddling social

together with the tall-crowned male hat,

customs related to respect and St. Paul’s views

survived as Quaker headgear into the

on hats. Any man who prays with covered head

nineteenth century. Quakers chose plain

disgraces it, Paul wrote to the Corinthians; any

versions of existing styles; the Anglican

woman who prays uncovered, disgraces hers.

Church similarly ruled that clerical outdoor

Quakers would remove their hats only at prayer,

dress should follow current styles in sober,

having concluded that only God merited

undecorated fashion with ‘a square cap and a

respect – a risky stance in the volatile climate

hat to ride’. 23

of seventeenth century English politics.

opposite

21

The Quakers’ broad-brimmed hat [22] was

A nglican Clergy

the style current in the Restoration period.

It was indeed the clergyman’s outdoor hat that

When the Quaker William Penn wore his in an

created most problems for Anglicans.

audience with Charles II, the king removed his

Untenable with a wig, the square cap

own hat, observing that customarily only one

disappeared in the eighteenth century – hats,

person wore a hat in the royal presence. What

as we shall often see, must take hair into

was the difference between their hats, he

account. A black hat with a round, low crown

asked. Penn replied that his was plain, the

and shallow brim [23] then became the

King’s adorned: ‘the only difference in our

preferred headwear not only of the clergy but

religions lies in the ornaments that have been

also of the professions generally. Parson

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Woodforde, recording life as a country parson in late eighteenth century England, says little of hats but it would have been this type he bought in the 1770s for £1.1.0 (£125 today). He mentions hatbands for funerals, which would have been invisible on a tricorne. The plain wool felt, when cocked at both sides, became the ‘shovel’ hat, the familiar clerical headgear of the nineteenth century. The Archbishop of Canterbury carries one in a painting of Victoria’s accession of 1837. Also known as the ‘wide-awake’ (no nap), this style was worn by North American Quakers and became Union Army headgear in the American Civil War. Given the nature of their calling, clergymen were well advised to avoid fancy hats – hats are indisputably ornaments. If a clergyman were to signal his role through his hat the ideal would be a plain black hat, communicating respectability and even sanctity. Not all clerics agreed. Frederick Hervey, Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry, liked hats. Fond of travel but not of Irish weather, this absentee cleric’s mode of dress caused a stir abroad. In Rome in the 1780s his red plush breeches and big straw hat were taken for Irish canonical dress. Ten years on and increasingly eccentric, he was seen in a white hat edged in purple. Still in Italy in 1805 he was sporting ‘a purple velvet night-cap with a gold tassel and a sort of mitre on the front’24 – having not entirely lost sight of his vocation.

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A Bishop’s millinery foibles are one thing,

Eliot sets her story at the time of the Reform

absenteeism another. By the 1830s laxity in the

Acts. Similarly, Charlotte Bronte situates her

Anglican Church had become something of a

novel Shirley during the Luddite riots of 1811.

scandal. Materially, churches were crumbling,

Bronte’s exemplary rector, Mr. Helstone, is

and livings were often in the gift of local

guardian to the novel’s heroine, Caroline, and his

grandees, awarded to family members whose

hat is his leit-motif. Out of doors, ‘in full

way of life continued to be that of the class

canonicals, as became a beneficed priest, under

from which they sprang. Absenteeism was

the canopy of a shovel hat’, it represents his

often the rule, and parish work was done by

devotion to parish work. But at home he is stern

curates, who, on an average annual stipend in

and silent, Caroline says, leaving off benevolence

1830 of £ 81 (c. £10,000 today) were poorer

with his hat in the hall. In the rectory with

than most of their parishioners. Reform – of

Robert Moore, the man she loves, Caroline makes

politics or the Church – was a live issue in

him leave when she sees ‘the shadow of the

the nineteenth century’s cultural climate

shovel-hat [that] at that very instant fell on a

and novelists of the time took this up in their

moonlit tomb’27 as the Rector approaches. But

writings. How was a poor cleric expected

the hat’s kindly side is seen at the

to dress?

schoolchildren’s annual treat, when Helstone

George Eliot, in Scenes of Clerical Life, set in the 1830s, asks how the curate Amos Barton,

were written at a time when dissent and Catholic emancipation threatened the Anglican Church,

foundation of the Establishment … in a hat

was more ambivalent about reform. The

which shows no symptoms of … shaping itself

clergymen in The Warden of 1855 are

His wife’s effort

Norman Forbes (1859 - 1932). Opposite

Anthony Trollope, whose Barchester novels

himself in a way ‘that will not undermine the

according to circumstances’.

worn by actor

raises it to signal games, buns and tea.

with a wife and six children, can present

25

23 Clerical Hat, as

‘personifications of St. Paul … the cardinal

to keep them looking decent and do her

virtues seem to hover around their sacred hats’.

Christian duty finally kills her. Like a diligent

But when Archdeacon Grantly, on his way to

cleric in a 1830s church report, Amos is ‘always

bed, exchanges ‘his ever-new shovel hat for a

to be seen in a slouched billycock hat hurrying

tasseled nightcap’, he seems less exalted.

from one end of the village to another’. 26 The

Grantly’s shovel hat, like Helstone’s, represents

billycock, worn also by artisans and often

its wearer but without Helstone’s sense of

confused with the bowler, was a hard,

vocation: ‘large, new and well-pronounced [it] …

round-brimmed, wool felt, coarser and smaller

declared his profession as loudly as does the

than the shovel hat.

Quaker’s broad brim’. In one ‘shining new

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hats

clerical hat’ after another, Grantly embodies

Julian, seems to have high-Church leanings – a

the Church’s materialism and hostility to

biretta hangs by his panama. The Anglo-

change, convinced that reform will ‘close

Catholic Percy Dearmer, however, more wary of

cathedrals and make shovel hats and lawn

the incendiary nature of headgear, opposed the

sleeves illegal!’28

biretta in his Parson’s Handbook of 1899,

Trollope’s ironic take on the Church finds its

recommending instead the square cap; the

beginnings here in the contrast between the

biretta, he felt, would offend ‘an immense

worldly man and his unworldly calling. But Dr.

number of excellent folk, making the recovery of

Grantly’s hats raise laughter, not anger, and he

the Church more difficult’. 32 A member of

is more sympathetic than, for example, the

Julian’s congregation is indeed offended by ‘that

odious reforming cleric, Obadiah Slope of

old black thing on his head … we’d all be kissing

Barchester Towers. When Slope’s schemes for

the Pope’s toe before you could say knife!’33

preferment are unmasked, an onlooker

There was no distinct headgear for late

speculates, ‘his new hat has no doubt already

nineteenth and twentieth century Anglican

been ordered’. 29 A grand version of the shovel

clergymen apart from the shovel hat, the

hat – the one of Slope’s dreams, perhaps – is

acquisition of which – in Barchester at least –

described by a clergyman’s sister in Framley

had marked advancement. The Archbishop of

Parsonage, when she teases her brother about

Canterbury had one, with curly things at the

his future: ‘Shall you have a hat, Mark, with

side, as late as 1968. Top hats were acceptable

curly things at the side and strings through to

clerical city wear; ordinary brimmed felts were

hold them up?’ If not, she declares, ‘I shall

suitable for town and country. In the mid-

never believe you are a dignitary.’

30

The Anglican ‘shovel’ was in truth little

twentieth century, when hats ceased to be worn, the clergy, not to seem conspicuous, followed

different from secular black felts – the brim a

suit. There may now even be vicars in baseball

little wider and projecting at the front and the

caps – though perhaps not worn back-to-front. In

crown lower – but pace the Bishop of Derry and

Catholic Europe, however, priests kept shallow-

Dr. Grantly, authoritative clerical hats, to

crowned felts well into the late twentieth

convey an aura of sanctity, should be slightly

century.

shabby. The vicar’s new panama in Barbara

be kept ‘until its ribbon became rusty with age

J ewish H eadgear and the H allelujah Bonnet

and the straw a greyish-yellow’. 31 A straw was

The market for fine felts crashed around 1960.

correct clerical summer wear but Pym’s vicar,

But for one faith they remained: Orthodox Jewish

Pym’s novel of 1952, Excellent Women, was to

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hats and power

law requires that men’s heads shall be covered, especially in the synagogue – the

was an effort in bad times to cross that ‘wall’. At some imagined corner between fashion,

reverse of Christian practice. However, St.

church and army sits the Salvation Army’s

John Chrysostom in his commentary on St.

‘hallelujah’ bonnet. During the nineteenth

Paul’s rules about covering heads in church,

century occupations such as those of postmen,

observes that in the early Christian church

policemen and nurses had been given a

men covered their heads when praying, ‘which

uniform and distinctive headgear. Salvation

was a Grecian custom’.

34

This suggests that

Army men had soldierly peaked caps; the

early Christian rituals were not so different

women’s black straw bonnet, however, seems

from those of the Jews. Just what hats ancient

quaint and unsoldierly, its big bow redolent of

Greeks would have worn at prayer is another

an obsolete femininity. By 1890 hats had

question, since generally they wore hats only

displaced bonnets, but when a fashion item

for travel. Some hats worn by Jewish laymen

falls out of favour, sometimes it has a second

and clergy are even now similar to the old

life as uniform, as happened here to the

Quaker styles, or, with a pinched crown, not

bonnet. Its adoption by nurses and its

unlike the fedora. The yarmulke, a skullcap, is

connection to good works grew out of its

worn by Jewish males, often under a hat. Felt

association with feminine modesty, as the

takes us back to Stockport, where so many

bonnet, unlike the hat, shielded the face and

hats were made and where, in fact, employees

covered the hair. The hallelujah bonnet

in the textile trades were often Jewish. The

conferred upon its wearer an aura of good

‘invisible wall’ that Harry Bernstein describes

character that with its defiantly old-fashioned

in his memoirs of Stockport during the First

air embodied the convictions that sent these

World War, is that between the Christians and

women into the worst corners of cities and

Jews on either side of a street. Recalling the

protected them as surely as any helmet.

telegrams that came announcing yet another casualty, he describes a Jewish neighbour

Battle H ats

running into the street howling with grief; ‘her

The head coverings of kings and clerics

husband ran after her and his bowler hat fell

communicate some of the aura that surrounds

off, showing the little black yarmulke

such personages. Soldiers, one might think,

beneath’. Years later he finds old Mr. Harris

cover their heads for more practical reasons; as

still with ‘his bowler over his yarmulke’.

the head is the most vulnerable but most

Perhaps the placing of the archetypal British

visible part of a soldier’s body, headgear should

bowler on the indispensable Jewish yarmulke

both protect and terrify. There is a strong

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hats

connection between the ceremonial headwear

Military headgear, like Church hats, was

of monarchs and military: the plumes – real or

about authority and allegiance. In February

imaginary – that hover over royal heads are the

2015, when Joshua Leaky was awarded the

vestiges of the incorporation of the nonhuman

Victoria Cross for bravery in Afghanistan, he

into the battle dress of warrior-kings to

said ‘the only thing I was really scared of was

frighten the enemy. The Duke of Courland, a

letting this down’ – pointing to the badge on

seventeenth century Baltic ally of the English

his Parachute Regiment beret. 35 Group loyalty

king, brought with him a regiment of Norsemen

and pride were key symbolic effects, crucial to

in helmets of bearskin taken from the beasts

an effective fighting force, and all armies use

they had slain. And in one form or another this

headgear to distinguish regiments, ranks,

absurd and uncomfortable headgear survives

ceremonial wear, daywear and battle dress.

as ceremonial wear among palace guards and

Most European military uniform took shape in

grenadiers in surprisingly many European

the eighteenth century when it became

countries – though the bearskin’s size and

important to distinguish nations on a

fearsomeness must originally have been

battlefield as other than warlords and

impressive.

marauding bands. The Prussians were the first

24 Household Cavalry, 2014.

right

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to institute a national army uniform and the

theatricality, and modernity to atavism.

25 Napoleon’s

Hanovers in Britain followed suit; George III

Considerable flamboyance is permitted.’36

bicorne, 1800.

and George IV obsessed over uniform, often

Flamboyant in all respects, George IV put

designing it themselves.

regiments into dress that was archaic even

Changes in battle headgear can usually be

then, reintroducing breastplates, swords and

related to the introduction of new weapons. For

bearskins that were of no use whatever in early

example, wide brims got in the way when

nineteenth century warfare, but were part of a

firing a musket so caps were adopted; metal

contemporary craze for all things ‘Gothic’.

helmets, however, seem little changed from the

Above

The rejection of Enlightenment ideals of

Anglo-Saxons to the last war. For the real

rationalism and order found its most radical

business of battle, headgear had to be efficient,

expression among extremists in the French

first as protection and later for camouflage. For

Revolution, an event that not only changed

everyday wear, armies favour caps, soft hats

European society, its politics and its dress but

and berets – it is in ceremonial headdress that

also its headgear. The standard European army

military might goes on display [24]. As

hat of the later eighteenth century was the

McDowell puts it – ‘practicality gives way to

tricorne, worn in many versions and at every

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hat had a lasting impact; one (he had several) sits on his tomb in Les Invalides, another became the world’s most expensive hat when it sold in 2014 for 1.9 million euros. Napoleon’s allies, the Danes, have cakes called ‘Napoleon hats’, Wellington, on the other hand, is remembered by his boots. The restrained if sumptuous aesthetic that evolved under Napoleon – in furniture, architecture or dress – was modelled on that of Imperial Rome, and as a display of power was as far removed from royal brocades, wigs and tricornes as possible. In Ingres’ coronation portrait of Napoleon, the emperor’s victorious, laurel-wreathed head is set against a goldhaloed backcloth, merging the values of Augustan Rome with medieval Christendom to make an extraordinary, quasi-religious icon. As a legitimization of power it almost works. Napoleon’s loot of empire influenced all 26 Wellington’s bicorne, 1800.

Above

angle in the attempt to give individuality to

aspects of the period’s visual culture; armies

army units. The post-Revolution avoidance of

adopted exciting headgear brought back by his

anything that smacked of the ancien régime

soldiers from Eastern Europe and the Middle

then produced the bicorne, the two-flapped hat

East. There were more bearskins, square-

we associate with Napoleon and his nemesis,

topped tasseled caps from Poland and shakos

the Duke of Wellington. Napoleon wore his

from Hungary – adopted by several national

bicorne sideways on, while Wellington’s sat

armies, adding a peak and changing a crown,

fore and aft; Napoleon embellished his with a

according to taste.

Revolutionary cockade [25]; Wellington’s was

Post-Napoleonic peace brought further

so heavily plumed that the hat almost vanished

exotic styles into the British army. The strange

beneath waving tendrils [26]. In terms of power

helmets still worn by the Household Cavalry

play, Wellington won the day on sheer weight

date from 1832 and originally had fur crests so

of ornament, but the sober shape of Napoleon’s

heavy that horsehair had to be substituted.

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hats and power

Certain items of military headgear have even crossed into the world of fashion – Queen

elegance, made it fashionable again. Military hats must convey legitimate

Mary’s toque with its feathered tuft recalls the

authority – the archaic, even absurd

shako – but traffic the other way is rare. The

flamboyance of ceremonial headgear with its

round, brimless pillbox hat, however, was a

plumes, furs and shining metal, is there to

fashion hat for women in 1860s Europe. Its

impress and intimidate. Faint echoes of

simple shape, worn at jaunty angles, captured

feather-and-tricorne power lingered in popular

male attention and it was adopted into the

memory and still lingers among livery

army as ‘off duty’ wear and kept by some units

companies, aldermen, mayors and royal

until the First World War, surviving well into

coachmen. Virginia Woolf mocked these hats

the twentieth century as headgear for the Boys’

‘now boat-shaped or cocked … cones of black

Brigade, telegraph messengers in Britain and

fur… of brass and scuttle-shaped; now plumes

bellboys in America. In the 1960s Jacqueline

of red, now of blue hair surmount them’. 37 As

Kennedy, the twentieth century’s icon of

late as the 1970s the Secretary to the Clerk to

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27 Lord Mayor & Queen Elizabeth at Mrs. Thatcher’s funeral, 2013.

Below

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hats and power

the Justices in Darlington was required to

painting’s other key figure is an elegant young

28 Eugène Delacroix,

wear a hat while discharging his or her

man in tailcoat and top hat. This is something

Liberty Leading the

function; though whether of the secretary’s

of an anachronism as top hats had not yet

choosing is not clear. At Margaret Thatcher’s

arrived on the Paris fashion scene in 1789, but

funeral service in 2013, the Lord Mayor of the

to the spectator of 1830, the hat – unlikely

City of London had a magnificently plumed

battle dress – would have signalled youth and

black tricorne [27]. As power withers,

modernity. Defined by their hats, the rebels are

feathers bloom.

an urban mix; as well as the bourgeois top hat

People, 1830. Opposite

there is the down-market pot hat, an army

Dissenting H ats

bicorne, a ragged felt worn by a boy wielding

We have been looking at hats associated with

pistols and a slouch hat on a fierce workman.

rank, power and the establishment. Headgear

The cockades on the hats echo the tricolore

has often had political implications, as much a

carried by Liberty who makes a pedestal of a

part of ceremonial march-pasts as tanks. But

fallen royalist soldier, his handsome young face

rebels and revolutionaries need headgear to

and gleaming helmet an oddly dissonant

signal their role too. The most famous

foreground note.

revolutionary hat is the red Cap of Liberty, seen

Sumptuary laws in pre-Revolutionary

in Eugène Delacroix’s painting of 1830, Liberty

France had laid down rules for the headgear of

Leading the People [28]. Liberty, who combines

two of the three estates: feathered tricornes for

the classical ‘Nike’ or ‘Victory’ figure with a

the nobility and black brimless toques for the

modern Parisian Marianne, wears the symbolic

bourgeois. Clearly neither style would do after

Phrygian cap of antiquity given to freed slaves,

1789, but on the other hand, as McDowell says,

coloured red for blood shed in the Revolution.

‘once the Revolution is over, you cannot lead a

For the French, it has lost none of its power.

government in a Phrygian cap’. 38 Army leaders

Furious Bretons in bonnets rouges marched on

wore bicornes with tricoloured plumes, while

Paris in October 2013 to protest against road

middle-class politicians favoured more genteel

taxes, an association of the cap with violent

headgear, specifically that of the English

protest that goes back to a Breton uprising in

country gentleman – tall-crowned, dark beaver

the seventeenth century. The government, duly

felts that had started life as country wear.

alarmed, dropped the tax.

Robespierre wore the round-crowned ‘sugar-

Delacroix’s romanticized image features

loaf’; Danton favoured a flat-top. Jacques-Louis

only one bonnet rouge – revolutionary leaders

David, a fervent revolutionary, painted M.

left this plebeian cap to the sans culottes. The

Seriziat [29] in 1795 in a high-crowned beaver,

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29 Jacques-Louis

topping his superb ensemble – also in English

David, M. Seriziat,

country gentleman style. A tiny tricolore

emblems of established military and political

cockade can just be seen to one side of the hat,

power. How then was dissent to be hatted?

without which he would literally have risked

Two of Delacroix’s rebels wear cheaper wool

his neck.

felts, cocked to one side and known as slouch

1795.

Below

The bicorne and the top hat had become

hats. Tall hard hats as a rule represent political and social conservatism; the dominant nineteenth century male styles of top hat and bowler, for example, were hats of the political and financial establishment. A soft hat, especially when pulled over one eye, was at best that of the bohemian outsider, at worst the headgear of the spy or anarchist. Its reputation was already bad by 1745 in Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa, when the vile seducer Lovelace, at a masquerade, flings off his ‘flapped slouched hat, and like the devil in Milton started up in [his] own form divine’. 39 With its broad brim and malleable shape it became the recognized hat of disguise on stage as well as in the novel. Elinor, the heroine of Fanny Burney’s novel of 1814, The Wanderer, concealing her identity in male dress, wears ‘a small, but slouched hat … that shaded [her] eyes’,40 that is considered so disreputable she is ejected from a concert room. In the mid-nineteenth century the slouch hat became the ‘Kossuth’ hat when the Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth caused a sensation as much with his hat as with his politics. When Garibaldi sported it, its reputation as the headgear of dangerous idealists was confirmed. The girls of an

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hats and power

Anglo-Irish family, on their way to Dublin

The slouch hat, like its wearers who found

hat, 1923.

Castle in A Drama in Muslin, George Moore’s

themselves on the windy side of the law,

novel of 1886, peering nervously out of the

emigrated and now leads a respectable life in

carriage at the crowd in the street, exclaim

Australia as the Akubra. In fine felt it is worn

‘how wicked those men in the big hats look …

not only by the military but also by males of all

I’m sure they would rob us if they dared’.

41

30 Woman’s Slouch Below

ages – neither royal nor revolutionary but

The slouch hat was indeed adopted by the

democratic. Opposite Flinders Street Station in

Fenians, activists in the Irish Republican

Melbourne, in a nineteenth century shop –

movement, and Anglo-Irish anxieties were

stubbornly anachronistic like Lock’s – it sits

soon justified – robbery was to become the

happily alongside an American Stetson, a

least of their worries.

Christys’ bowler and a grey silk topper.

The slouch hat on a female head suggests a rather different kind of threat; masculine and subversive, it was one of the suffragette’s favourite hats. The debate over women’s rights occupied the early years of the twentieth century, but never made as dramatic a visual impact as in the 1920s, when having won the vote, women cut hair and skirts quite shockingly short. Reacting against earlier millinery gigantism, the severe cloche and plain trilby joined the revolt. Hats rarely play key roles in novels, but in Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat of 1924, anarchic Iris Storm tears through the novel in a yellow Hispano-Suiza automobile and a green hat. The hat is first seen ‘bravely worn … but I could not see her face for the shadow of the brim, for it was a piratical brim’.42 [30] It is last seen lying on the road after her suicidal car crash. True to its nature, the hat signals danger, but in the hedonism of the interwar years, the danger was to Iris herself.

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3 affiliations and occupations

I

f hats are often an expression of individuality, they are also very often an expression of group identity. Headgear can subordinate personal identity to that of an institution,

occupation or company; to wear uniform, is, as Alison Lurie says, ‘to give up your right to free speech in the language of clothes’.1 Contradictory feelings result: a hat may inspire pride and loyalty, certainly, but also resentment, even mutiny. Emotions run less high when, as in nursing, headgear is vocational, or created out of practical necessity; royalty stoically finds for itself a quasi-uniform style. For army and church, headgear is part of the job. I shall be looking at a selection of occupational and institutional hats and their mutations over the centuries, but I end with a hat that over its short history has had a uniquely bumpy ride – the fascinating flight attendant’s hat.

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School H ats Children, in mid-self-discovery, rarely warm to dress that imposes an institutional self. Crossing the River Clyde on the last day of June 1959, cheering loudly, I – and twenty others – threw our St. Bride’s School panamas out of the train window to celebrate the start of a new rule-andhat-free life. John Rae, headmaster of Westminster School, found uniform a nightmare: ‘no other topic was more likely to be regarded as a touchstone of discipline’.2 A quirky angle or unsanctioned dent to regulation headgear demonstrated disdain for authority; you can do nothing very dramatic to a tie or blazer, but you can, like a convent girl in the 1930s, climb onto the school roof and stick your pudding-basin hat onto a chimney. 3 If, however, a pupil from another school did this to your hat, mayhem ensued, for round the school hat swirled a heady mix of allegiances and hatreds. What was the role of a school hat? The earliest schools in England, such as Eton College and Christ’s Hospital, founded in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries respectively, were charity schools for children of the poor, and clothes were part of the provision; they therefore marked the wearer’s dependent status as well as institutional philanthropy. The blue cassocks and yellow socks of the Christ’s Hospitals – also known as the Bluecoat schools – had therefore charity-school connotations and their ‘flat black caps of woolen yarn, about the size of a saucer’4 [31]

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affiliations and occupations

imposing order – was adopted by schools.

31 Nineteenth century

Headgear then not only identified a school but

Christ’s Hospital cap.

noted that butchers and Bluecoat boys ‘were the

also indicated compliance with certain

Opposite

only males one saw abroad with uncovered

standards of conduct. To be seen hatless out of

heads’, 5 but strong emotions have ensured the

doors, to fail to raise hats to ladies or superiors,

survival of these caps. In 1833, Charles Lamb,

incurred severe penalties. By the twentieth

recalling his days at Christ’s Hospital, felt it

century school top hats and boaters had

would be sacrilege to change the uniform and

become markers of wealth and privilege [32],

indeed in 2010 pupils voted to keep it. As the

instantly identifiable and an invitation to

headmaster remarked in a recent prospectus,

mockery and missiles – Lord Snooty, a foolish

the school is traditional but quirky, charitable

boy in topper and striped trousers in The Beano

but privileged; perhaps the cap, stuffed in

(a boys’ comic paper), invariably comes to

pockets but kept, embodies these

grief. Even Eton’s own scholarship boys had to

idiosyncrasies. The original caps were probably

guard their hats from attacks by fellow pupils.

the flat Tudor bonnets shown on boys in

School hats might also signal seniority or

recently discovered murals at Eton. Penny

privileges – St. Paul’s School bizarrely awarded

Hatfield, Eton’s archivist, believes there was no

boaters to boys over six feet tall.

were obstinately retained, if generally unworn. Frederick Willis in his memoirs of the 1890s

standard headgear until the advent of the

The top hat was more widespread in schools

famous Eton ‘topper’ around 1840, and guesses

than the boater, perhaps because it was more

that adult fashions were adopted as the school,

firmly anchored, but also because its status in

and others like it, moved up the social scale.

the adult world lent prestige. Eton has now

Eton boys, according to The Hatter’s Gazette,

abandoned toppers but Anne de Courcy recalls

‘are bound by an unwritten charter of etiquette

how at the Eton and Harrow cricket match of

to wear hats not caps … to distinguish the

1939, Old Boys arrived immaculate in grey top

Etonian from other school boys’.6 Harrow’s

hats. Harrow finally won a tense match but the

straw hat (not a boater, says their archivist) was

battle resumed with hats: ‘top hats were

similarly a mid-nineteenth century fashion.

bashed and umbrellas broken … elderly men

Before elementary education became

took off their toppers, which were kicked from

mandatory in Britain in 1870, schools like Eton

their hands … Soon nothing remained on the

and Harrow were educating a privileged if

scene of Harrow’s splendid success save what,

anarchic elite. It was not until Thomas Arnold’s

48 hours earlier, had been new school hats.’7

reforms of 1830 at Rugby brought order to

Eton had caps for sporting prowess and even a

curriculum and conduct that uniform – a way of

cap for the talentless, but on 4th June every

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affiliations and occupations

32 Eton toppers,

Education for girls in England was lamentable until church and lay organizations

1928.

Opposite

set up schools in the late nineteenth century.

33 School Cap, Just

Uniform coats with pudding-basin-shaped hats

William, Richmal

[34], with varying brim widths, became

Crompton, (1922); jacket of 1944 edition.

standard in girls’ schools around 1900. This

Left

severe style was a reaction to the period’s

33 Girls’ school hats,

extravagant millinery, but at the sternly academic St. Paul’s School the girls hated their

1944.

Below

hats and tried to beat them into fashionable shape. Experimenting in style or signalling dissent, you could dent the crown, tip brims up year, cheerfulness breaks through, and in

or down at the back or front – but retribution

flower-garlanded boaters Etonians row down

often followed. Boys’ headgear generally

river, scattering flowers to either side.

followed adult fashions, while girls’ schools

Still worn, Harrow’s straw hats derive from cricket gear and, following fashion’s tendency

generally kept the bowler shape, adding the unassertive beret in the 1940s.

to poach from sporting dress, the cloth cap – worn by almost every boy by 1900 – was also a cricket cap. Cheaper, sturdier and therefore more democratic than either toppers or boaters, the cap was long-lived. Between the two World Wars, William, the hero of Richmal Crompton’s Just William books for children, is never without his – perilously slanted and much abused [33]. In Ronald Searle’s post-war Molesworth books, Molesworth wears his cap at a similarly disdainful angle, while the cap of school-swot Fotherington-Thomas is correctly set. Few state or private schools now require headgear; as one headmaster explains, too few children walk to school to make them mandatory.

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35 St. Leonard’s Convent hats, 1890s. Courtesy of The Order of the Holy Child Jesus.

Right

Bucking the trend, Britain’s oldest girls’

white sun bonnets’, and for the annual picnic

school, Red Maids of Bristol – a city in

‘the popular thing was to go shopping … to

southwest England – continued to wear poke

buy sherbet and floppy straw hats’. 8 Another

bonnets until red felt bowlers replaced them in

former pupil, Mother Mary Alexius, writing of

1920; selected pupils still parade in bonnets on

her schooldays in the 1870s, remembers how

Founder’s Day. A group of small girls at the

‘the uniform was changed about every two

Convent of the Holy Child Jesus were

years … The first uniform hat I remember was

photographed in their garden in 1917 in a

brown straw with brown ostrich feather – just

variety of frilly bonnets [35] that owe

the fashion at that time … the clothing

something to Kate Greenaway’s illustrations of

mistress must have taken a fancy to [feathers]

the 1880s. Two pupils from the Convent’s sister

and ordered half a gross as the hats appeared

school, St. Leonard’s, smile broadly in their

each with a small brown ostrich feather.’

gorgeous Sunday-best hats. Mother Mary

Mother Mary Alexius goes on to say that ‘in

Gundred, a former St. Leonard’s pupil, recalls

the playground we had white straw sailor hats

how ‘in the garden in the summer we wore

… they had little bells attached and were used

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affiliations and occupations

nostalgically recalled; they are now ‘special

36 St Mary’s School

great addition to the orchestra’ – an

occasion’ hats, symbols of ceremony and

Chapel Cap, 1955.

imaginative, though probably short-lived,

tradition.

Below

as tambourines; they would have been a 9

use of a school hat. St. Leonard’s belonged to the Roman

N urses and Nannies

Catholic Society of the Holy Child Jesus and

St. Mary’s penitential cap evokes nuns’

these hats confound the austere image of faith

headdress, as do the starched caps once worn by

schools. They offer light-hearted and becoming

nurses. Both derive from medieval styles, which,

alternatives to regulation bowler styles and

fashioned from rectangles of white linen, were

suggest that good minds could coexist with

starched, folded and pinned according to styles

pretty hats. In adult life, after all, an educated

of the time and tastes of the wearer. Adopted by

taste would be useful – but such latitude was

religious orders, they fossilized into vocational

rare. Pupils in the 1950s at St. Mary’s Anglican

headdress, as the Salvation Army later fossilized

School, in Wantage near Oxford, called their

the bonnet. Early nursing care took place in

brown berets ‘cow-pats’; they also had ‘chapel caps’, squares of starched buckram placed on top of the head and down the back, the whole fixed by elastic behind the ears [36]. ‘It was impossible to have any impure thoughts’, Lyn Constable-Maxwell recalls, ‘because all our energy was concentrated on walking with head held aloft in case the cap fell off. They served to remind us never to be vain.’10 Penelope in Ronald Frame’s novel Penelope’s Hat felt similarly cowed when, in the 1950s, she was made to wear a school hat: ‘the little girl retreated and became less of a person … “I can hold my prettiness in check, beneath the shadow of the brim, to be accepted as one of you.”’11 Feelings about school hats are rarely moderate, it seems. Beaten up, kicked, pushed in pockets and finally jettisoned with whoops of joy, they were also fiercely guarded and

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religious foundations and nuns’ habits thus

The author of Ambulance World, describing

became associated with nursing. Post-

the change, says that nursing became

Reformation, however, the status of those

something of a fad – ‘women all over the

involved in the care of the sick declined, and

country became nursing-mad’, donning ‘more

their caps became indistinguishable from those

or less appropriate costumes’.16 The wealthy

of servants.

heroine of Mrs. Humphry Ward’s novel Marcella

The author of Ambulance World and

of 1894 is, however, serious about nursing. As a

Nursing, of 1895, notes that before 1860 decent

trainee she appears in a nurse’s bonnet and

nurses were rare, little more than

cloak, and off-duty, in ‘a little bunch of black

‘superannuated charwomen’, often ‘addicted to

lace that called itself a bonnet with black

the use of spirits’.12 (Presumably the author

strings tied demurely under the chin’.17

has Mrs. Gamp in mind, the nurse in Dickens’

However frivolous it sounds, this bonnet was a

Martin Chuzzlewit of 1844. Sitting by a patient

coded sign of female virtue.

and reeking of gin, she wears ‘a yellow cap of

Hospitals in Britain and North America

prodigious size, in shape resembling a

often invented their own caps and bonnets. A

cabbage’.13 ) By mid-century, Florence

nurse’s headgear therefore not only identified

Nightingale, with an impeccable pedigree and

her profession but also marked her affiliation to

powerful personality, had introduced hygienic

a particular hospital. The Girls’ Own Annual of

care carried out by trained women in white

1890, in an article on nursing in England, notes

caps and aprons. Nightingale’s cap, apron and

the pretty caps of Putney, the spotted ones of

lamp became icons of the nursing profession.

Norwich and the ‘very attractive’18 trailing

For soldiers in the Crimea, Nightingale nurses

ribbons of Devonport. The caps were originally

in ‘snowy white aprons and caps looked like

intended to cover the hair and there were

bits of extra light’.

14

Mrs. Panton, in her

essentially two styles: the all-encompassing

handbook of 1893 on being ill gracefully, found

cap with a veil at the back, common in

their uniform soothing, especially when

continental Europe, and the short cap that sat

supplemented by ‘those charmingly becoming

on top of the head – sometimes frilled or

caps … even a plain woman ceases to be plain’.

beribboned – which was typical in North

However, ‘cabbages’ lingered: she recalls a

America and Britain. One nurse saw her cap as

nurse ‘in dull brown, covered by a cap … a

‘a bejewelled crown’,19 but as hairstyles grew

mere band of dirt-coloured material [whose]

shorter and the cap lost its point as hygienic

effect was so odious I did not inquire into its

covering, a more prosaic nurse in 1936

component parts’.15

grumbled that it was ‘for purposes of ornament

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affiliations and occupations

only’. But, said another, ‘What would the nurse

Thomas’s Hospital, London, 1956] I had this big

37 Nurses’ caps,

be without a cap? She would neither feel nor

butterfly cap which I loved. It was meant to

late 1950s.

look like a nurse.’

20

cover all your hair.’

21

Barbara Jury, a nurse in

Girls who tossed their hats away at the end

America in the 1940s, recalls her cap acquiring

of school in the 1950s later might reverently be

different coloured stripes as she was promoted.

receiving a nurse’s cap [37]. A ‘capping’

She points to the respect it commanded and its

ceremony, after six month’s training, often took

importance to patients as identification:

place in a church, and seems to have continued

‘nowadays they wear such get-ups you don’t

longer in North America than in Britain. As

know who you’re getting!’22 That nurse of 1936

hats fell out of favour during the 1960s, so

might have been more careful what she wished

eventually did the nurse’s cap, replaced by

for – her cap was significant.

disposable ‘scrubs’. Britain’s longest serving

The late nineteenth century nurse’s cap,

nurse, Jean Colclough, interviewed in 2012,

butterfly-like, had soared into an elevated

regretted its loss: ‘As a student [at St.

sphere of its own, leaving behind its domestic

9780857851611_txt_app.indb 73

Below

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38 Norland Nanny, 2008.

Right

origins. In the extensive households of

As much time was spent pushing prams, it

Victorian families, however, nursery nurses –

was the outdoor dress of the Norland nurse

or nannies – shunned affiliation with household

that distinguished her. In 1932 the College

servants and, in elaborate caps and aprons,

replaced bonnets with the bowler. With this

mimicked the hospital nurse. Before the

hat the College emphasized the elite,

founding of Norland College for nursery nurses

educated status of their graduates; unlike St.

by Emily Ward in 1892, however, there was no

Paul’s girls, the Norlanders treasured these.

recognized training or uniform. Mrs. Ward

Their uniform looks and is expensive, and its

used dress to distinguish her college-trained

chocolate brown bowler, with initialed silk

nurses from what she called the ‘park nurse’,

hatband, introduced in the 1960s, was of high

who dallied in Kensington Gardens.

23

She

quality felt, so valued that orders had to be

stipulated cloaks and bonnets and a

validated by proof of eligibility [38]. In 2013

photograph of the 1890s shows a Norland nurse

the bowler became a dashing Stetson –

in a fetching black confection, very like that

equally desirable. Tailored coats and felt hats

described in Marcella by Mrs. Humphry Ward

became a professional hallmark, and starched

– coincidentally Emily’s sister-in-law.

white frills were old hat.

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affiliations and occupations

Caps : M aidservants and M ilkmaids

it is important to bear in mind that almost any

Markers of respectability and modesty, caps

might have been required to serve as a working

were worn by all women from the seventeenth

garment’. 26 Mobcaps, with frilled brims and

century onwards, indoors and out.

ribbon bands, beginning as simple headgear

Englishwomen were known for their caps, but

for all classes of married women, indoors and

the ‘commode’ or ‘fontange’, popular in both

out, grew in complexity and were high fashion

France and England, was more headdress than

by 1800. According to Aileen Ribeiro, visitors

cap: its vertical, fan-shaped frame covered with

to Britain ‘found it difficult to distinguish

lacy pleats was fixed to a linen cap to which

servant maids from their mistresses’. 27

two long streamers, or lappets, were attached.

item of clothing worn by labouring people

24

Servants wore caps but they were not

It could attain dizzying heights: Joseph

‘uniform’; there was an element of choice. Jane

Addison in The Spectator of 1711 considered

Carlyle in the 1830s noted that when a

there was ‘not so variable a thing in nature as a

handsome Italian count came to call, her

lady’s headdress … I have known it rise and fall

servant Anne put on ‘a certain net cap with a

25

above thirty degrees.’

Hoods or ‘calashes’

most peculiar knot of ribbons’. 28 Though maids

covered these confections outdoors. When later

were poorly paid, clothing was often provided

in the century caps subsided into simpler

and hand-me-downs were part of the perks;

shapes of linen or muslin, the lappets were

they also kept up to date and spent

often pinned up.

substantially on dress. Caps, as Styles says,

A portrait of George I’s daughters of 1733

were ‘highly visible accessories’; even out of

shows them in coifs or ‘round-eared caps’ of

doors they were seen under hats or hoods. He

muslin, framing the face like bonnets, the

records that in the 1780s a servant spent 2/- (c.

lappets tied under the chin. The round-eared

£15 in 2014) on a cap; another gave 5/10d (c.

caps on the servants in William Hogarth’s

£35) for lace for hers. 29 The maidservant

group portrait of 1750 [39] are probably

Pamela, heroine of Samuel Richardson’s novel

cambric: protective, practical workwear, they

of 1741, about to flee the predatory Mr. B., is

are little different from the royal caps. John

reluctant to take the clothes her late mistress

Styles’ study of eighteenth century clothing,

had given her; she therefore buys ‘two pretty

Dress of the People, makes plain the

enough round-eared caps and a little straw

significance of dress in the lives of ordinary

hat’. She distinguishes the ‘round-eared

people. He points out that ‘in exploring the

ordinary cap’30 from one she had of her lady.

relationship between occupation and clothing

Joseph Highmore’s 1744 sequence of paintings

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hats

39 William Hogarth,

of Pamela shows her generally in mobcaps, but

century, waxing and waning in size and height

Six Servants, 1750,

round-eared ones when modesty counts [40].

according to fashion and hairstyles. It can be

Tate Gallery, London. Below

9780857851611_txt_app.indb 76

Pamela gave her name to a low-crowned

seen under the black silk hats worn in George

straw hat worn out of doors over the cap. The

Stubbs’ painting The Haymakers of 1785. As

style, loosely termed ‘milkmaid’ or ‘bergère’,

Styles explains, if this headgear seems

was worn by women in all walks of life, and is

improbably modish, it was in fact worn by

discussed in chapter five. The mobcap

working women at the time, though not linked

underneath lasted well into the nineteenth

to any occupation. The cap gained a protective

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affiliations and occupations

brim, side and back panels, to become the

danger’. 31 Hardy regretted its loss: ‘now they

archetypal nineteenth century ‘milkmaid’

wear shabby millinery bonnets and hats’. 32 It

bonnet, associated with agricultural work [41].

survives, however, in the infant sunbonnet.

It was also very pretty: Alec d’Urberville,

The ladies of Mrs. Gaskell’s 1830s Cranford,

flirting with Tess in Thomas Hardy’s novel of

though scorning fashion, still place great

1891, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, refers to ‘that

importance on caps: Miss Matty, in a rush to

wing-bonnet – you field-girls should never

appear decent for visitors, inadvertently places

wear those bonnets if you wish to keep out of

her best cap on top of a workday one. By 1850

40 Joseph Highmore, Pamela and Mr. Williams, 1744.

Left

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41 Wing bonnet,

caps had subsided into lacy ornament for the

We may put all our money in mines,

The Swing and the

mature and work wear for servants, where they

We may put all our cheese into traps,

soon became resented as badges of servitude.

But we put, it is clear, our foot in it, dear,

Recalling life in 1880s Oxfordshire, Flora

When we tried to put you into caps.34

Orchard, Tom Browne, 1900. Below

Thompson records how girls in service were ‘put in caps and ate in the kitchen’.

Waitresses

Interviewed by a prospective mistress,

Caps returned, however, in waitresses’ uniforms.

twelve-year-old Martha is told to bring ‘caps

In the second half of the nineteenth century,

and aprons … plenty of changes’. 33 Uppity

smart city stores and improved public transport

maids aping the fashions of their betters were

made shopping an acceptable leisure activity for

the topic of countless end-of-century jokes.

a woman on her own and tea rooms grew up in

In 1891 a girl was judged unfairly dismissed

towns and cities to provide respectable

for refusing to wear a cap. Punch had fun

refreshment locales. Tea making and drinking

with this:

were associated with women and home – unlike

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affiliations and occupations

coffee – and the tea room with fine china, napery

Fred Harvey, to serve in refreshment rooms

and waitresses in aprons and caps, was a

along the Santa Fe railroad. Trained, well paid,

reassuring place for a woman to sit and

housed and supervised, they wore big white

socialize.

aprons, topped, however, by rather startling

Glasgow, one of the wealthiest cities of

headgear – a decorative bow had become the

nineteenth century Europe, invented the tea

cap itself. The sassiness of this giant bow

room. 35 Stuart Cranston, a tea merchant,

disturbs the outfit’s otherwise starched

opened his tea rooms in 1875, but it was when

propriety. Suggestions of sexual availability

his sister Kate opened hers in 1886 that the

often bedevil images of working women, as we

concept took off. In the city’s business centre,

saw with the straw plaiters of Luton and

these tea rooms were intended for both sexes.

London’s West End milliners; intimations of the

They were notable for ‘advanced concepts of

chorus girl lurk in those perky bows.

comfort and taste’, 36 but it was Kate’s choice of

A British tobacco company appointed John

Charles Rennie Mackintosh to design new

Lyons in 1887 to run their food and restaurant

premises in 1896 that was revolutionary. Lyons

empire. As an artist, Lyons knew the value of

tea shops had been established in London with

presentation. His first London tea shop in 1894,

‘parlour-maid’ waitresses in black dresses,

brightly decorated with neat waitresses

aprons and caps. Mackintosh, as well as

serving quality products, made earlier cafés

designing a strikingly contemporary décor,

look dull. Fred Willis remembers ‘cosy’ tea

neither domestic nor English, also designed the

rooms of the 1890s with waitresses in white

waitresses’ dress – uniform would be a

caps and aprons ‘darting about’. In contrast to

misnomer. A photograph of 1900 shows two

the rather mixed message of the Harvey Girls,

elegant girls in light stuffs, pearl chokers and

Lyons’ waitresses looked safely domestic. In

pussycat bows – but no caps. Mackintosh did,

the 1920s they were known as ‘Nippies’ – quick

however, demand a uniform hairstyle, more

on their feet – and became national icons in

difficult to enforce, I imagine, than a cap. The

their caps with a red ‘L’ embroidered on the

rejection of any badge of servitude, or anything

front [42]. Lyons was anxious to keep their

cosily, English-ly domestic, might be credited

image wholesome; spotless uniforms were

to Mackintosh’s feminist wife as well as Kate

mandatory, and before World War II, no married

Cranston.

women were employed. However, in 1932 when

Caps were certainly in evidence on

Harold Davidson, Vicar of Stiffkey, appeared in

America’s ‘Harvey Girls’, young women of good

court charged with importuning girls in central

standing recruited in 1886 by an Englishman,

London, it seemed it was Nippies he liked. No

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affiliations and occupations

blame attached to the girls, but the scandal

‘cauliflower’ shape, still in use; a flat beret

42 Lyons’ tea room

must have added interest to the tea rooms,

shape; and a tall toque, whose pleats represent

‘Nippy’, 1920.

and money to the till.

the hundred ways to cook an egg.

Opposite

Chefs, Bakers and Butchers

Carême’s toque could go no higher, Alexis

No waitress ever attained the tall white drama

trumped him in a flat black velvet beret with a

of the chef’s ‘toque’, created in the 1820s and

tassel. Impracticality was its point, Soyer being

never deposed. Cooks and bakers had had

too grand to actually cook. The sous-chefs’

stocking caps, worn tight round the forehead to

floppy stocking caps would have reminded

cover the hair. For bakers and pâtissiers in

them of their inferiority. William Thackeray

France this had evolved into a flat beret with a

records a fashionable French cook in 1852

thick raised crown handy for carrying trays. On

wearing a white hat ‘on one side of his long

the annual parade of the trade guilds through

curling ringlets’. 37 As this cook is under the

the medieval French town of Loches, near

master chef Mirobolant, his hat is probably the

Tours, the bakers even today wear dough-

softer ‘cauliflower’ – a stiff toque worn

coloured soft felt caps shaped like loaves with a

sideways would have been tricky.

Chefs are famously competitive; as

cascade of brilliant cock’s feathers,

Soyer, the Reform Club’s chef in the 1840s,

In William Orpen’s magnificent portrait Le

representing oven fires. The caps were

Chef de l’Hôtel Chatham of 1929 [43], the chef

originally protective and practical, adapted

radiates authority; he wears his toque as

from everyday headgear; the toque, on the other

Edward VII wore his top hat – a crown is taken

hand, was about status, not use.

as read. His pleated, soft-topped toque is more

In post-Napoleonic Europe cultural

wearable than the stiff towering type, which

snobbery attached to all things French, and

professional suppliers still offer in cotton or

French chefs became de rigueur. Antoine

coated paper, and which can still be seen in

Carême, employed in 1820 as chef to Lord

some French restaurants. No one suggests the

Stewart, decided to insert cardboard inside

toque is useful: working dress ‘plays an

his cook’s cap to give it importance. The limp

important part in heightening or diminishing

old cap, he said, had a sickly air. Chefs across

job prestige’, an early twentieth century cooks’

Europe took to the French toque, its loftiness

handbook rules, and ‘it must be worn with

matching that of the top hat, another

pride and maintained with care’. 38

contemporary marker of authority. It underwent various changes: a softer

Fred Willis’s memoir records that butchers and Bluecoat boys were the only males to be

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affiliations and occupations

seen in London without hats. This is odd,

of radical sympathies. Butchers, reacting to

43 William Orpen, Le

because butchers seem to have worn a variety

fashion, replaced top hats with bowlers around

Chef de l’Hotel

of hats; a seventeenth century regulation

1860, though some clearly went hatless – Mr.

stipulated woolen caps and by the eighteenth

Bones in ‘Happy Families’ has a modish

century butchers are in stocking caps. Brewers

coiffure but no hat. But by the turn of the

and butchers had similar outfits in the early

century, straw boaters were adopted and

nineteenth century – Mr. Bung the Brewer has

butchers are still identified by striped aprons

a red stocking cap in the nineteenth century

and boaters, now usually plastic. Judging by

card game ‘Happy Families’ [44] – but a Punch

the evolution of their headgear, they were the

Bones the Butcher.

cartoon of 1851 of a butcher in tailcoat and

aristocrats of the High Street.

Below

Chatham, 1921. Opposite

44 Nineteenth century playing cards: Mr. Bung the Brewer, Mr. Chip the Carpenter and Mr.

shiny top hat shows butchers had moved on.

apron and peaked cloth cap, fellow to the

Carpenters and Coal and F ish Porters

school cap. Miss Stanbury, in Trollope’s He

Certain types of occupational headgear are

Knew He Was Right of 1869, refers to one worn

purely practical, improvised to answer problems

by her nephew, whose egalitarian views she

produced by the job. Carpenters, needing

detests, as ‘one of those flipperty-flopperty

lightweight, disposable coverings against dust,

things on his head that the butcher-boys

invented small square paper caps, like the

wear’39 – an early reference to the cap as a sign

pillbox seen on the ‘Happy Families’ carpenter,

He is addressing his ‘boy’ who wears a striped

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Mr. Chip [44]. When paper became cheap in the

certain forms of work. Dickens, visiting a coal

nineteenth century this simple headgear was

porter’s lodgings in The Uncommercial

adopted by a range of manual workers,

Traveller, where a man lies sick, notes his

plasterers, plumbers, bricklayers and printers

‘ragged pilot jacket and rough oil-skin fantail

whose jobs involved dust and dirt. George Eliot

hat’.42 What these jobs have in common are the

treats the paper cap on Adam Bede, eponymous

wet, dirty, smelly loads men carry on their

hero of her novel of 1859, almost as a crown.

heads or shoulders. Coal was a valuable

Adam is broad-chested and tall, ‘his jet-black

commodity, however, and a more positive

hair … the more noticeable by its contrast with

image of the coal porter appears in Dickens’

the light paper cap’.

40

Eliot glorified the cap, but

Sketches of London of 1849: ‘we have known a

to Dickens it represented the dirt and

landlord wait patiently … for his rent through

humiliation of manual labour. In David

seeing a couple of fantails with their load at the

Copperfield of 1850, Mick, who ‘wore a ragged

door’.43 The headgear here represents the man,

apron and a paper cap’,41 introduces David to his

as the crown the monarch or the bowler the

tasks in the dreadful blacking factory. The

banker. With central heating and ‘wheelie’

Museum of London, however, has a piece of

bins, we have lost a hat and a word.

headgear – the fantail hat – that was protection against filth worse than that of any blacking

H ard H ats

factory. It is a roughly rectangular thick dark

Construction workers, and those in occupations

slab of varnished leather, weighing several kilos.

incurring danger from falling objects, now wear

It was based on the ordinary round felt hat: the

‘hard hats’ – actually helmets. Though close

brim, turned up in front, spreads and lengthens

cousins of the sports helmets discussed in

down the back to form a kind of gutter. The hat

chapter seven, they are heavier and tougher.

was in use in Billingsgate fish market until last

Early shipbuilding workers put pitch on their

century, and one sees how foul water was

hats as reinforcement; leather hats were used

channeled away from the head. Fishermen wore

before World War I and then replaced by steel.

and still wear the sou’wester, a soft waterproof

America in the 1930s required helmets for

version of this hat.

construction workers, producing ones with

Gustav Doré’s images of London in the

visors to protect the eyes and face. By 1940

1870s show fantails on several categories of

aluminum and Bakelite had replaced steel, and

worker: fish porters, dockworkers and

after the war, thermoplastic took over as

warehousemen. Necessity invented the fantail

cheaper, lighter and easier to work – it also

that, without being uniform, was connected to

allowed for bright colours that look more cheerful

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affiliations and occupations

as well as being safer, though helmets are never

constabularies. But toppers were easily

45 Policeman’s top

going to be beautiful. Being obligatory on

damaged and difficult when pursuing

hat, 1840.

worksites and in factories they appear

criminals, so the ‘custodian’ helmet of cork

democratic, but colour produced hierarchies –

covered in felt was introduced in 1863. It

white helmets are often for superiors. In

combined a Prussian army helmet with the

awkwardly perched helmets, politicians, royalty

newly popular bowler and carried a metal

and celebrities smile bravely in photo

badge in front, with the policeman’s personal

opportunities, hoping this headgear will

and divisional number. Adopted by police

somehow democratize their public image.

forces elsewhere, local additions included

Below

spines, chinstraps and spikes, but by 1900

Policemen, F iremen and Postmen

French police were wearing the more practical

Headgear as a mark of authority is crucial when representing public bodies, but for policemen and firemen it must also be protective. Watchmen patrolled eighteenth century British towns at night, and a painting by Johan Zoffany of 1763 shows an elderly watchman in an unimpressive stocking cap. In 1805 a mounted London force was created and in 1829 Robert Peel introduced foot patrols. Peel had to avoid too military a look – any suggestion of calling out the army was provocative. Tall hats are more impressive and better protection than flat ones; the first regulation hats were therefore ordinary top hats, with reinforced leather tops, strong enough to stand on or use as a weapon – a sort of Swiss-Knife of a hat [45]. A rhyme recorded by Flora Thompson refers to this pre-helmet period: ‘There goes the bobby in his shiny black hat/And his belly full of fat.’44 The Police Act of 1856 required towns across Britain to create uniformed

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hats

46 Firemen, 1910.

peaked kepi and in Europe generally peaked

was poor protection in civil disturbances

Below

caps became the norm. Privileging the

however, and in London in the 1970s a padded,

dramatic over the practical, Italian police opted

hard plastic helmet was introduced, though the

for Napoleonic bicornes, though taking to

style remained traditional. In 2002 moves were

white ‘custodian’ helmets in summer. America

made to change this but finally it was kept,

kept the helmet until the 1920s, just in time to

having by now become a tourist attraction – an

be recorded on film by The Keystone Cops. Cork

unexpected extra role. All ranks, however, have

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affiliations and occupations

peaked caps for mobile patrols – like top hats,

Postmen needed headgear for official

helmets are tricky in cars. When convincing

identification as well as protection – against

headgear for policewomen was needed, a

weather rather than felons or falling masonry.

reinforced bowler was created.

Aboard mail coaches in the eighteenth century,

Long predating policemen’s helmets,

47 Postman, 1930s. BeloW

letter carriers’ uniforms were based on

firemen’s helmets came into being when fire

coachmen’s livery: initially cocked hats but by

brigades were formed after the Great Fire of

1830, beaver felts. Royal Mail postmen were

London of 1666. Initially organized locally, firefighting then passed into the control of insurance companies in the eighteenth century, who soon saw the value of uniform both for publicity and team spirit. Eighteenth century insurance advertising shows heroic figures in crested helmets with neck flaps. The superintendent of Edinburgh’s brigade in the 1820s describes ‘hardened leather helmets, having hollow leather crests to ward off falling materials … the hind flap to prevent burning matter … getting into the neck of the wearer’.45 But by 1830 firemen, like policemen, took to the top hat. Fire brigades passed back into local hands and when London’s brigade was formed in 1866 their brass helmet was based on Paris’s Sapeurs-Pompiers. Uniform varied locally, but this shiny helmet [46] – with splendid opportunities for repoussé ornament of crossed hosepipes and torches – quickly caught on. Remarkably little has changed in three centuries of firemen’s helmets. Materials are now lighter and tougher – metal became hazardous with the advent of electricity – but the ‘Roman’ helmet of the first fireman still lies behind the modern ‘Darth Vader’ version.

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affiliations and occupations

Crown servants; their uniform should therefore

gave air travel a known frame. Brass-buttoned

48 Danish Airlines

impress. By 1790 they were kitted out in

jackets and peaked caps with badges seemed,

male crew, 1938.

scarlet coats and tricornes with gold

and still seem, the obvious male uniform [48].

Opposite

trimming. However, by 1830 postmen – like

Unlike merchant or national navies, however,

coachmen – were top-hatted. In 1861 new

women played key roles in the care of

uniform was introduced: the scarlet tunic

passengers. The first stewardess was a

became blue but worn with a red tie, and tunic

registered nurse and by 1935 these nurses

and trousers had a red trim [47] – Britons still

sported soldierly trouser suits and ‘forage caps’

expect postboxes and post vans to be red. In

(i.e. military ‘undress’ hats); these were of cloth

the mid-twentieth century a softer peaked cap

with vestigial brims that folded up onto a dented

was introduced, familiar to small television

crown. Easily rolled up and stowed in a pocket,

viewers on Postman Pat.

they were more reassuring than glamorous. But the idea that medical or military aid

T he F light Attendant

might be needed en route was

The creation in the nineteenth century of new

counterproductive and by 1950 airline imagery

kinds of service (the Penny Post) and new forms

was featuring attractive girls in suits similar to

of transport (the railway) required headgear to

the military styles fashionable post-war, with

signal efficiency and modernity. Rail travel had

prettified forage caps perched on their heads.

become part of a new leisure industry, and rail

Rail travel sold scenery, ocean liners promised

officials had to look helpful as well as

luxury, but only air travel promoted feminine

impressive, first in respectable top hats then

charm. The evolution from quasi-military

more practically in peaked caps. Twentieth

styles, to the provocative candy-coloured ‘hot

century air travel, however, posed

pants’ and ‘minis’ of the 1970s, to the return of

unprecedented image problems. What exactly

more sober looks, mirrors the fluctuations and

was an aircraft? Railway coaches initially

ambiguities of a stewardess/hostess/flight

resembled stagecoaches; stations were Greek

attendant’s status.

temples or medieval castles; uniforms, a

What of her hat? Juggling the concept of

synthesis of civilian and military styles. When

headgear as a sign of authority as well as

civil aviation started in the 1930s there was

fashion statement has always been tricky. But

nothing to turn to. Leaving terra firma in a

to represent a nurse, waitress and a national as

metal cylinder required reassurance and a

well as a company representative is a lot to ask

familiar vocabulary; the adoption of naval

of a hat. To have ‘two hats’ is to have two jobs

terminology – cabins, pilots and stewards –

or two identities, but no occupational hat was

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49 Two BOAC air

ever as busy as that of the flight attendant. In

times … in the cabin [it] must be replaced

hostesses, ca. 1950.

The Flight Attendant’s Shoe, Prudence Black

before the aircraft has come to a stop’.46 But

Above

tells the story of Australian airline uniform.

when jets transformed air travel and airlines

The metamorphoses of the hat as it adapted to

became more competitive and less exclusive,

changing attitudes and circumstances is part

attitudes changed. Hostesses were national

of her story and in what follows I owe much to

and corporate showpieces and with sleek new

her pioneering work.

aircraft like the Caravelle and the Comet,

Photographs of 1950s stewardesses show

offering haute cuisine and stylish décor, the

them in formal suits and forage caps that

aircraft aisle became a fashion catwalk.

convey well-groomed efficiency [49]. First on

Qantas’s dress and jacket of 1964 broke with

the Qantas hostess’s checklist was the hat

tradition. A hostess at the time thought the

which, they were told, ‘must be worn at all

hat, with a heart-shaped brim and bow, ‘really

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affiliations and occupations

50 Air Hostess’s puffball hat, 1968 - A Space Odyssey: 2001.

cute’.47 However, hats must take account of

futuristic helmets in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968

hair, and if air travel had undergone a

movie 2001: A Space Odyssey [50].

revolution so had hair, now smoothly bouffant.

Left

During the 1970s and ’80s commercial

Hats annoyingly dented these styles and

companies proliferated, the market grew

hostesses increasingly left them off, using

cutthroat and the role of airlines as flag

them to store cigarettes. As airline uniform

carriers weakened. Symbolizing respect and

became fashion conscious, frequent updates

conformity, hats were losing out to hair in the

were inevitable and the late sixties and

iconoclastic ’70s as feminists discarded these

seventies saw some startling outfits. Qantas’s

decorative symbols of decorum. Airline hats

mini-skirted uniform of 1969 was overtly sexy

consequently became parodic with tiny trilbies

and the new hat – more jokey than seductive –

and silly caps. Qantas opted for a striped

was an orange puffball inspired by the

mini-trilby hat that was particularly hated; the

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hats

51 Flight attendant’s

hostesses called it ‘the Redback Spider’. For a

caps [51] was, I imagine, calculated; in

hat, 2013.

time hats were abandoned, but then an

emergencies military looks prompt obedience.

Below

efficient image came to be more important

Hostesses, stewardesses, flight attendants

than a fashionable one. Besides, the entry of

– these young women Prudence Black says,

the Gulf states at the upper end of the market,

achieved in their time ‘a recognition not seen

with attendants’ outfits gracefully conforming

in many professions.… Highly visible in crisp

to Islamic custom, caused airlines to think

tailored suits and forage caps’, with a degree of

again. With airlines merging and competition

personal freedom and the world their oyster,

from cut-price companies, questions of

their lives became a small girl’s dream – until

nationality were less important than a sound

about 1980. Then with cramped seats and bad

corporate image. Significantly, the

food hastily served in confined conditions, the

authoritative dark-suited, brass-buttoned look

glamour of air travel vanished. Budget airlines

of male personnel hardly altered, and the pilot

do not rely on feminine charms; they get you

– the aircraft’s final authority – never

from A to B cheaply – with or without hats.

abandoned his hat. Terrorist threats in the early twenty-first century made safety a

Conclusion

priority; security became irksome and flight

As a marker of affiliation and occupation, the

crews often the focus of anxiety and anger. The

flight attendant’s hat seems to have gathered all

return of airlines to more formal uniform with

aspects of the topic under one roof. Like the

attendants in smart if slightly severe hats and

school hat it was imposed, though hostesses too found ways to assert individuality. Resented at times, but also affectionately recalled, airline hats, like nurses caps, are now collectables. Like cockades on tricornes, company insignia lent authority to the silliest hat. The pilot’s hat was always serious, but what the hat did for the hostess was more complicated; the need to look reassuring became a need to look smart, and with mass tourism, to look fun – and then once more, to be reassuring. The mutations of her hat not only reflected fashion but changing cultural and social attitudes, and despite continual change the flight attendant is always

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affiliations and occupations

recognizable. Prudence Black asks us to imagine

angles that indicate they are not really workers.

seven young women in yellow mini-dresses,

But if there is a generalization to be made

knee-length boots and tiny forage caps: ‘there is

about occupational hats of the past, it is that

no mistaking they are flight attendants’,

48

she

they were usually ill-adapted for practical use.

says, though this is actually a deodorant

That the hostess’s hat might keep hair tidy on

advertisement. But remove the caps and they are

windy tarmacs is as plausible as the idea that

just 1970s girls. The flight attendant’s hat was

nurses’ caps kept infection at bay. ‘Adherence

never anti-fashion, but put it on and you cease to

to fashion’, Phillis Cunnington says, ‘is closely

be fashionable.

bound up with one of the overruling motives in

Fashion hats and occupational headgear

dress, that of asserting importance and

would seem to be mutually incompatible.

prestige … what confers dignity of appearance

Fashion is transitory while signs of affiliation

and what is convenient for moving about in [or

and occupation are by definition constant; for

working in] are rarely the same.’ With the

schoolchildren this stasis is an anathema. The

wearer in control headgear becomes noticeably

recurrence of a bowler style – never quite in or

less practical and more stylish as he (it is

out of fashion – is notable when gravity is

usually he) rises socially – stocking caps for

required, on schoolgirls, nannies and flight

butchers are clearly more practical than

attendants, for example. The chef’s toque may

boaters. When headgear reflects the glory of

shrink a little or be made of paper but, unique

the employer it often impedes action: the

in shape and linked to the all-important

bicornes of royal coachmen, for example, or the

business of food, it seems immortal, and, like

top hats of hotel doormen. But tradition or

fantails and carpenter’s caps, in charge of its

loyalty within a group or an occupation ensures

own career. Fantails and carpenter’s caps,

the survival of the least practical, least

however, met specific needs and when those

comfortable headgear. This is good news for

changed the headgear went. Servants’ caps

historians, Cunnington concludes, for the

allowed some exercise of taste, but lacking

workingman and woman ‘has left us a trail of

status were resented. Surviving briefly on

surviving customs … to give body to our vision

waitresses, they breathed their last as the

of the past’.49 Even poets had their hats. Laura,

Bunny Girls’ big ears.

in Flora Thompson’s annals of Oxfordshire,

What were occupational hats supposed to

thought ‘the big fat man [in] the dark Inverness

‘do’? The uniform yellow helmets of today’s

cloak and soft black hat’ looked very strange.

construction workers convey little other than

‘He was a poet, Laura was told, and that was

utility; politicians perch them on their heads at

why he dressed like that.’50

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4 etiquette and class

A

certain amount of eccentricity in dress is allowed, even expected, in artists, poets and assorted bohemians. Roger Fry’s choice of a big, battered old hat for his self-portrait

would have been deliberate [52]. ‘Funny, isn’t it’, Fred Willis’ friend Mr. Bolder observed, ‘that people who paint pictures think it’s proper that they should act barmy? Hats like horses wear in summer.’ 1 A soft felt, when Victorian manhood was ramrod-stiff in top hats or bowlers, was unconventional, but hardly threatening. The upper-middle-class Forsytes, however, in John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga, worry about June Forsyte’s fiancé, architect Philip Bosinney. He pays a duty call on the Forsyte aunts ‘in a soft grey hat – not even a new one – a dusty thing with a shapeless crown. “So extraordinary, my dear, so odd!” Aunt Hester had tried to shoo it off a chair, taking it for a strange disreputable cat.’2

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hats

52 Roger Fry,

As we shall see in what follows in this chapter,

code. Manners, morals and codes of conduct,

Self-Portrait,

etiquette manuals outline codified rules of

Clive Aslet observes, have now been

hat-wearing, but novels and autobiographies

‘privatized’ and modern man ‘has never been

record the lived experience of etiquette as well

more on his own’. 4 Contradictions occur in this

as the adventures of those breaking the rules.

process, since, when everyone wants to show

The Forsytes, ‘seeking the significant trifle

individuality, there is a tendency for everyone

which embodies the whole’, Galsworthy

to use much the same things to display that

explains, ‘fastened by intuition on this hat …

individuality. As an expression of difference

each had asked “Come now, should I have paid

baseball caps don’t really work. Traditional

that visit in that hat” and each had answered

etiquette survives in some contexts – hats are

“No!”’3 Hats as the Forsytes once understood

still correct for weddings, race meetings and

them are no longer part of a generally accepted

contacts with royalty – but otherwise anything

1930.

Opposite

or nothing goes. Occupying a dramatic, isolated position among items of dress, the hat was once associated with a unique code of conduct: to wear a hat indicated superiority; removing it, a sign of deference. A photograph of 1943 shows Winston Churchill shaking hands with the Russian Ambassador Maisky, who has removed his hat, while Churchill retains his. The French still salute success with the exclamation ‘chapeau !’ – doffing an imaginary hat. For the Forsytes, members of the expanding middle class of nineteenth century Europe, dress was the clearest sign of shifts in the social order; change and improvement was their credo, but also a cause of anxiety. The realist novel, developing in parallel with this class – its main readership – scrutinized conduct and appearance. Hats therefore punctuate novels, signalling compliance with custom and fashion, but more often – because

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etiquet te and cl ass

it was more interesting – noncompliance: the

on the Forsyte aunts in the ‘London season’, is

parameters of proper headgear were defined by

wrong; he should have worn a silk top hat. In

the improper. Because of its association with

the London of the 1870s journalist George Sala

status and respect, this hat etiquette was an

thought a soft hat ‘all very well at the seaside

especially male concern. The ephemeral nature

… But “in society”, in the streets of cities and

of women’s headgear made rules difficult to

in paying visits to those whom we hold in

apply and for much of the earlier period

respect we can do no better than to adhere to

women’s headgear was a question of caps and

the “stovepipe” of the best silk velvet nap.’6

hoods. But if, as a man, you wear the wrong

Bosinney’s gaffe might be explained by

thing, ‘you will probably do the wrong thing’, a

poverty, eccentricity – or indifference? June,

manual of 1910 ruled, ‘and be the wrong

when asked, believes he is indifferent. The idea

thing’.

is met with outrage: ‘A man not know what he

5

Among the Forsytes, Bosinney begins

had on? No, no! … He was an architect … [but

wrongly, behaves badly and ends tragically. An

they] knew two architects who would never

educated man, he should have known the code.

have worn such a hat upon a call of ceremony

Advice manuals were published from the 1830s

in the London season. Dangerous – ah,

onwards giving guides to hat conduct. Novels,

dangerous!’7

however, offer less varnished versions of the

Two styles dominated nineteenth century

hat’s role in society. Ending in 1930, The

men’s hats: the top hat and the bowler (see

Forsyte Saga traces forty years in a family of

chapter five). Straw hats were summer wear. At

English yeoman stock who made the classic

the end of the century two new styles, the

nineteenth century move into the city-based

Homburg and trilby, were added. The cloth

merchant and professional class. The class-

cap, originally indicating low status, moved up

conscious Forsytes resist or respond to social

to become sportswear, and in the early

shifts, fastening on hats as signals of change.

twentieth century, a gesture to radicalism. For most of the nineteenth century, however, the

Top H ats

top hat was de rigueur. An advice manual has a

Men’s etiquette focuses on the hat’s removal,

required list of ‘morning and evening dress

women’s etiquette on its retention. Women are

[top] hats – felt, silk and beaver’, 8 inspired

largely concerned with style and taste, men

doubtless by the author’s trade as gentleman’s

with the type of hat and its condition, as well

outfitter. However, ‘when a gilded youth set up

as the where, when and how it is worn.

as a man of fashion’, Fred Willis says, ‘he had

Informal and scruffy, Bosinney’s hat, for calling

the whole outfit and it was part of his

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hats

education to know when, where and how to

doubtless convinced, like a character in a

wear them.… There was a hat for every

P. G. Wodehouse novel, that ‘where girls are

occasion and season. To go hatless through the

concerned, nothing brings home the gravy like

streets was to relinquish all claim to sanity.’

a well-fitting topper’.11 George Sala hardly

9

Top hats might all look alike, Willis says,

recognized ‘wideawakes, porkpies and what

‘but we had thirty shapes in my firm … A

the Americans call “soft hats”. A real hat – a

young man about town would far rather spend

hat of authority – should be stiff, cylindrical

a night in Vine Street police station than be

raven black, or milky white, and shiny.’12 At

seen walking down Piccadilly wearing last

the introduction of the topper in 1790, cocked

season’s topper.’ Such young men were

hats became ‘old hat’. When silk replaced

10

beaver as fabric, hats became lighter; but defects were quickly visible on the fabric’s glossy surface, causing more anxiety and comment than its predecessors. When the silk hat was adopted mid-century by Prince Albert, its status was assured. Fashion, a British periodical of 1900 for men, offered rules. Weddings, afternoon calls and receptions demanded a tall silk hat; for business and morning wear, a bowler with a lounge suit, or a silk hat with a morning coat; afternoon tea and church required a tall silk; for balls, formal dinners or the theatre, a silk or ‘gibus’ hat.13 The gibus was a top hat invented in France by M. Gibus that with a flick of the wrist collapsed into a flat oval and could be stored under a theatre seat. Bosinney’s omission was ill-judged but not fatal. For James Hood, however, in George Gissing’s novel of 1888, A Life’s Morning, the loss of his hat out of a train window is fatal. He belongs to a new class of clerks and salesmen, who, required to be always professionally

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etiquet te and cl ass

dressed, were often forced into extravagance.

glossy top hat then embodies modernity and

53 Prince Albert

He is on his way to a business meeting on

success. With shiny, fragile surfaces and

in a top hat, 1861.

behalf of Dagworthy, his employer, and knows

seasonal variations of curl, brim and height,

Opposite

‘it was impossible … to present himself hatless

top hats were not only expensive but, if they

at the office of Legge Brothers’.14 He buys a

were to continue to display superiority, high

cheap hat with his employer’s money, believing

maintenance.

all can be explained. But Dagworthy ruthlessly

‘A man is known by the condition in which

sacks him, precipitating Hood’s suicide. In

he keeps his hat’, says The Hatter’s Gazette,

Dorothy Whipple’s novel High Wages, set in

‘[if] in an undeniable state of dilapidation, what

1913, her shop-girl heroine, Jane, also loses a

salve can be applied to the wounded spirit?’17

hat, blown off into the street. The loss is not

[54] Sherlock Holmes, examining a bowler at

fatal, as a young man rescues it and love

the start of ‘The Blue Carbuncle’, a short story

blossoms. For a man to lose his hat is serious,

of 1892, deduces that its owner is a sedentary,

for a girl it may be sweetly dizzy.

middle-aged intellectual, fallen on hard times, whose wife no longer loves him. And his house

Condition

is without gas. The hat is out-of-date and badly

Contemplating his muddy ancestral acres in

brushed (unloving wife), but good quality and

Dorset at the start of Galsworthy’s trilogy,

large (big brain); it contains grey hairs and

James Forsyte, who resides in London’s smart

indoor dust, signs of sedentary middle age.

Park Lane, concludes the Forsytes have done

And gas? The hat bears five tallow stains. In

well. James wears a ‘high hat … the speckless

fact its owner, though corresponding in every

gloss updated by careful superintendence’ – a

sad detail to Holmes’s description, is innocent.

butler’s daily duty. James’s older brother,

But alone, in a frock coat and a Scotch bonnet

Jolyon, retains the beaver version, ‘an

– ‘fitted neither to my years nor my gravity’18

excessively large hat’ which he removes in hot

– he is happy to see his bowler again, salve to a

weather as ‘the great clumsy thing heated his

wounded spirit. Anxiety about a hat’s

forehead’.15 Mr. Turveydrop in Charles Dickens’s

condition is endemic: the Forsytes have butlers

1855 novel Bleak House also keeps his felt

to maintain standards, others have to look out

topper: ‘a hat of great size and weight, shelving

for themselves. ‘Don’t you go treading on my

downwards from crown to brim’. The detail in

hat, young woman. You brush your skirts

Galsworthy is a sympathetic reflection of Old

against it and you take a shillin’ off its value,’19

Jolyon’s conservatism; in Dickens it underlines

grumbles an elderly gent in H. G. Wells’s novel

Turveydrop’s obesity and indolence. The new

The History of Mr. Polly.

16

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hats

54 Battered top hat,

A ngles

Wells’s feminist heroine of 1909, in a London

c. 1900.

It is not the beauty of the hat, Robert Lloyd said

street on her own, is addressed ‘in a wheedling

in 1819, or the want of it that matters: ‘the

voice’ by an apparently respectable man

grand point is … the position which it is made

wearing ‘a silk hat a little tilted’. 21 She is

to assume on the head’. 20 ‘Cock your hat!’

puzzled, but the reader scents danger. Lloyd

Frank Sinatra advised, ‘Angles are attitudes.’

suggests right, left and forward tilts according

Tilted to the side, a hat could look rowdy or

to different moods; thrusting the hat down on

impertinent [55]; tilted back, leisurely; but

the head over the ears is bad, but worst is

tilted too far looked tipsy. Ann Veronica, H. G.

‘sticking the hat on the back of the head’,

Below

producing ‘slipshod’ and ‘grotesque’22 effects [56]. A tilt like Sinatra’s telegraphs cheery defiance, as does Mr. Jorrocks in Robert Surtees’ novel, who after a boat trip, sticks ‘his hat jauntily on one side as though he didn’t know what sea-sickness was’. 23 Angles can be deliberately or accidentally comic, a bowler tilted forward onto the nose, for example, or a topper lurching over one ear. But as Henri Bergson, in his 1914 study on Laughter noted, ‘You may laugh at a hat, but what you are making fun of is not the piece of felt or straw but the shape that men have given it – the human caprice whose mould it has assumed.’24 Sports headgear is especially prone to comedy – a topper can look dashing on a cricketer of 1850, but not when he runs and it falls off, as it certainly must.

Old or N ew How did toppers become so widespread? Willis explains that there were those like Charlie Wallop, who relieved London’s West End hatters of discards. Charlie had been a hatter, his wife a

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etiquet te and cl ass

trimmer, and by renovating discards they made

afterlife of a top hat: ‘The lower and greasy

55 Top hats, Thomas

a good living out of ‘perfectly sound, good

portion is cut off; and a second-hand silk hat

Onwhyn, The Love

quality hats … sold in pubs to cabmen, busmen

may be generally recognised by the shortness

and such’, 25 and so on, down the line. Henry

of the crown. Then by dint of ironing, brushing

Mayhew’s illustrated account of Victorian

… it is made to lay smooth and sleek, while ink,

London low-life features street vendors and

glue, gum, paint, silk and brown paper cover …

vagrants in battered toppers – vestiges of

the breaches which time and wear have

respectability. John Thompson, documenting

achieved. Thus for two or three shillings a hat

London’s street life of the 1870s, marvels at the

is sold which really looks as if it is new.’26

Match, Henry Cockton, 1847. Below, left

56 Top hat, Richard Doyle, The Newcomes, William Thackeray, 1855.

Below, right

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hats

Willis emphasizes that a gentleman’s hat,

A 2016 Coda

though impeccable, should not be noticeably

A top hat changed the life of Colin Rosie from

so: ‘it would have been bad in the eyes of men

that of a homeless man to co-owner of a

of quality to have anything about them that

successful business. In an interview for The

was obviously new. Gentlemen had their hair

Financial Times in 2016 he says that when his

cut every day so it never looked newly cut. “If

life collapsed he kept the top hat he’d had for

you will allow me to say so, sir,” remarks Willis

years. Wearing it he found he wasn’t hassled in

to a client, “you can take a smart hat. Smart,

the grander areas of London. ‘I could even walk

mind you, without looking smart …” “Good

into a posh hotel and use the bathrooms.’ One

Lord! I don’t want anything that looks smart!”

night, noticing this elegant hat, a charity

“Quite so, m’lord.”’27 A century later our

picked him up sleeping rough, housed him and

contemporary Stephen Jones believes ‘a man’s

said if he could raise £100 they would equal it.

hat shouldn’t look box-fresh and shiny … stick

He found some second-hand top hats and a

it in the dog’s basket if you must’.

market stall owner to lend him space, and sold

28

‘Tedium in fashion’, says dress historian

all the hats in one day. In partnership with the

Anne Hollander, ‘is much more unbearable

stall owner he now sells around four hundred

than any sort of physical discomfort’, 29 and by

hats a week – trilbies, bowlers, fedoras as well

the late nineteenth century the top hat had

toppers. Some are new and made in Asia but

become tedious. In mid-Forsyte Saga, Young

many are vintage and worth several thousand

Jolyon wears a ‘grey top hat instead of his

pounds. He has plans to expand and hopes to

usual soft one’ for the Eton and Harrow match

go into hat production. So, despite that loss of

‘to save his son’s feelings, for a black top hat he

status recorded by Galsworthy in the 1920s,

could not stomach’. 30 The hat’s ability to

enough respect for the topper is embedded in

command respect was fading. When Soames

our cultural memory nearly a century later to

visits a newspaper office to demand the editor,

have marked Colin Rosie out as special – not

‘after a moment’s inspection of his top hat he

just for the hat but because he had cared for it.

was taken down a corridor and deposited in a

Hats, as Rosie says ‘went out of fashion in the

small room’, where he waits a very long time.

1960s, but there is no shortage of wearers now

By the end of the trilogy toppers were no longer

… I’m sure that original top hat helped save

everyday wear: ‘The shade from the plane tree

me.’32 He hopes to return the compliment.

fell on [Soames’] neat Homburg hat; he had given up top hats – it was no use attracting

T he Political Homburg

attention to wealth these days.’31

Abandoning the topper, Soames Forsyte took

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to Homburgs, and it was Edward VII as Prince

World War II, members raising a point of order

of Wales who introduced them, bringing them

had to be ‘seated and covered’ – that is, hatted.

from Germany as presents and wearing one

In a painting of the House of Commons of

himself on informal occasions. Unlike the top

1833, 36 after the Reform Act, some members

hat and bowler, it was a soft felt, derived from

are in toppers – even a green one – perhaps

the Alpine hat. Austrian architect Alfred Loos,

prompting the Duke of Wellington to say he

fanatically Anglophile about hats, in 1894

had never seen so many ‘shocking bad hats’.

allowed that with the Alpine hat – which he

In America the Homburg became a political

calls the loden – the Austrians finally produced

hot potato at the 1953 inauguration of President

a decent hat, one that ‘conquered English

Eisenhower, where etiquette decreed silk

society’. 33 With its dented crown and curled

toppers. Having once sold hats, the incumbent

brim it had a distinctive outline; it was not so

President Truman felt strongly about them and

soft you could wear it anyhow like ‘slouch’ hats

wore a silk at his own inauguration. ‘After all,’

that habitually lapsed into shapelessness;

Time magazine said, ‘it was the nearest thing

Edward’s example made it acceptable in town.

the USA had to a coronation.’ But Eisenhower

As is clear from The Forsyte Saga, much of

was dismayed at the prospect: ‘He’d be

what had been unacceptable before the First

damned if he was going to parade down

World War became acceptable after. Rigidity,

Pennsylvania Avenue in a top hat.’ Some

whether of manners, morals or hats, gave way

congressmen demurred, but Eisenhower held

to greater laxity. Shortage of shellac

34

during

out: ‘They are going to be the silk hat boys.

the war meant that quotas of toppers and

And we will wear dark Homburgs.’ Truman

bowlers could not be met. The bowler replaced

fumed: ‘The president should wear the most

the city topper and the Homburg was endorsed

formal of formal clothes.’37 Eisenhower was

for less formal wear, growing stiffer as it

Republican, Truman a Democrat, but as so

gained status. In 1930s Britain it arrived

often, radical change is best undertaken by

socially when Churchill [57] alternated it with

conservatives. If this hat spat seems trifling,

his famous bowler; his successor Anthony

the American hat manufacturer Mortimer Loeb

Eden wore it so often that it became known as

saw it as a mortal blow.

‘the Anthony Eden’. Neither was making a

Responsibility for the hat’s general demise

political point, though Socialist leader Keir

as part of modern men’s apparel has been

Hardie’s cloth cap, when he entered Parliament

attributed to President Kennedy, whose boyish

in 1892, was for Willis an ‘atom bomb’.

35

Hats

were not worn inside Parliament, but until after

quiff was never hidden by a hat, but decline had already begun in the 1930s. Eisenhower, a

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hats

comfort and personal appearance over recognized social signifiers, these two presidents were entering – all unconsciously – a new era, identified by French philosopher and sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky as one where ‘we no longer love things … for the social status they confer, but for the services they render, for the pleasure they provide’. 38 Kennedy did not even wear the Homburg’s successor, the trilby. Little distinguishes the trilby from the fedora; both were soft felts with dented crowns, the fedora wider-brimmed with more of a ‘snap’. 39 Often pale in colour, the fedora was more popular in America and Europe than in Britain and adopted by adventurers (Indiana Jones) and bohemians as romantic but more respectable than the ‘slouch’. Nowadays, ‘in an era of eclectic dress’, American hat historian Debbie Henderson says, ‘a fedora can symbolize a range of social and occupational levels. If the bowler has gone the way of the entertainer, the fedora has been grabbed up by the person in the know … now the most dressy style’40 [58]. In Britain, the trilby became the universal business hat; the bowler’s territory narrowed to the city and St. 57 Churchill’s

Kansas boy, might have been rejecting East

Homburg, 1941.

Coast elitism, but going hatless was also a

Above

question of comfort and personal choice.

Boaters and Panamas

Kennedy did in fact wear a top hat in 1960 to

‘No man who aspired to be a member of

his inauguration, but never again. Semi-royal,

respectable society would have dreamed of

Kennedy really had no need to show conformity

walking abroad after May in the regulation

with etiquette. In privileging autonomy,

bowler’, Willis says. ‘Straw boaters then

James’s.

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etiquet te and cl ass

appeared as spontaneously as wild roses on the

Old Jolyon Forsyte found his topper

hedgerows and the sombre bowler was

unbearable in the hot summers of the late

carefully laid away until chill October.’41 So

Victorian period and men started to replace tall

when Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula walks

hats with light felts, boaters and panamas. The

through London in November, all in black, in a

Hatter’s Gazette of 1894 reported that ‘the

straw hat which ‘suits not him or the time’,

weather was so hot … that at last common

42

something is up. ‘A straw hat cannot be worn with a black coat of any kind’,

43

Mrs Humphry

sense triumphed and there was a sudden epidemic of straw hats’. Ladies have taken to

ruled; furthermore, it was leisure not city wear.

plaiting, the Gazette continues, and ‘the Queen

Dracula is not respectable.

herself is plaiting straw for hats for her sons

Straw hats have always been part of the working wardrobe of the countryside, but they

and nephews’. 46 The Cunningtons call the straw hat the

also surface as fashion items: ‘bowlers, boaters

most significant headgear of the 1890s,

and the rest are constantly appearing Above

‘destroying an age-old symbol of social rank,

because they are permanently in use Below’44

for this new kind of headgear had no class

(socially rather than physically speaking). In

distinctions’. 47 Distinctions were invented,

Britain the straw boater was originally naval

however, and like the topper, condition, style

headgear, cooler in the Empire’s more torrid

and tilt became important; nothing too new,

zones than the traditional hat of varnished

and certainly not a novelty like Pooter’s helmet.

leather. The Cunningtons note the first mention

‘The real old school’, Willis says, ‘despised the

in 1849 of a ‘nautical hat’ and by the next

creamy whiteness of the normal boater and

decade it had become a fashion item: ‘flat

wore only a straw hat the colour of old

crowned and narrow-brimmed with ribbon

parchment … it stamped the wearer as out of

bands which dangled behind’. Available at all

the “top drawer”’. 48 Society was not ‘in town’

prices, the straw sailor hat was an obvious

during summer, says an advice manual; so ‘if

accessory to light clothes and quickly became

you happen to be in town, you can wear a light

summer wear across class boundaries, sex and

thin lounge suit and a straw hat’. 49 Matthew

age [7]. Schoolboys and clergymen took to them,

Peel-Swynnerton, in Arnold Bennett’s Old

and by the end of the century, inspired by the

Wives’ Tale, leaps out of a cab in summertime

Princess of Wales, women were trimming

London, ‘holding his straw hat on his head’ to

boaters and skewering them onto their coiffures

greet ‘another straw hatted figure’, Cyril Povey,

with hatpins. Girls’ schools adopted them but

an upwardly mobile provincial. The cabman

only St. Leonard’s added bells.

waits with ‘no apprehension of miserly and

45

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etiquet te and cl ass

ungentlemanly conduct by his fare. He knew

mounted stick [he feels] extraordinarily

58 Fedora, 2012

the language of the tilt of a straw hat.’ But he

different’.

(from the American

50

is wrong: Matthew is broke and Cyril pays. By 1900, when Bennett’s novel ends, the

53

Kipps is taken up by middle-class Helen and worries about his appearance: ‘Luckily she had

English gentleman’s sartorial image was no

not seen the Panama hat. He knew he had the

longer a badge of social stability, but was, as

brim turned up wrong.’ He looks better without

Christopher Breward argues, ‘a contested site

it at a boating party, but then awful scenes

for the playing out of struggles for pre-

with top hats ensue, during which Helen

eminence between waning and rising social

remarks crushingly, ‘“a real gentleman looks

groups’. Made in Ecuador but exported from

right without looking as though he had tried to

Panama, panamas had been popular during the

be right”. [Kipps] in his heart was kicking his

California gold rush, but they took off globally

silk hat about the room.’ Etiquette here is

when Napoleon III popularized them after the

specifically class-related. The point of upper

Paris Exhibition of 1855 [59]. The best hats

class ‘distinction’, as Pierre Bourdieu showed

were so finely woven that the fabric looked and

in his book on the subject, is that you’re

felt like silk – and they were expensive. Edward

supposed to know it all without being taught.

VII spent £ 90 (£ 800 today) in Bond Street on

The final straw – literally – for Kipps is a party

his: ‘One hundred pounds for a Panama’, the

to which he wears a frock coat, ‘a Panama hat

Strand Magazine exclaimed, ‘enough to take a

of romantic shape, grey gloves but for

three month’s holiday, enough to keep your son

relaxation brown button boots’, to convey an

at college, enough to buy a small farm.’52

air of ‘seaside laxity’. 54 The occasion is a

51

Galsworthy’s contemporary, H. G. Wells,

TV series ‘Mad Men’). Opposite

fiasco, exacerbated for Kipps by seeing his first

launches his plebeian hero, Kipps, into

love, Anne, employed as a waitress. He

Edwardian society with an inheritance and

abandons Manners and Rules of Good Society,

makes him a circus turn, a carthorse among

drops Helen and rediscovers Anne; and, as he

show-jumpers facing the hurdles of etiquette.

falls into her arms, ‘his fashionable and

Like Galsworthy, Wells focuses on that

expensive “gibus” fell, rolled and lay neglected

significant trifle, the hat, to trace Kipps’s

on the floor’; 55 hats then disappear from the

career, whose ambition is to be ‘if not a

novel. Wells restores the couple to their proper

gentleman, at least mistakably like one’. He

station in life – keeping shop.

spots a panama ‘of the most abandoned desperate cut’ and wonders where to buy it;

H at Honour

soon, sporting ‘a Panama hat and a silver-

Little separates Wells’ image of Kipps from

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hats

59 Panama hat,

Chaplin’s clown. Bosinney’s hat was wrong,

could be shown without fear of revealing

c. 1900.

but not comic. If Kipps fails to match hat to

greasy linings. When the plumed cavalier hat

occasion, there was also the thorny question of

shrank to a neat tricorne it was not necessary

‘hat honour’: when and where to raise your hat,

to actually wear the hat. Carrying it was

to whom you raise it, what you do with it once

sufficient and it eventually evolved into the

off. By the eighteenth century wigs had altered

flat, purely ceremonial ‘chapeau bras’, still in

the manner of doffing the hat; previously it had

use. An illustrated manual of 1737, dealing

been raised and then placed against the thigh,

with dance and deportment, shows ways to

crown outwards, but with wigs, the inside

raise the hat and bow, complex manoeuvres

Below

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etiquet te and cl ass

allied to dance [60]. An advice book of 1897

together ‘one should lift the hat … bowing first

recalls that time when ‘lifting the hat used

to the lady’ and then include the gentleman in a

once to be a most elaborate performance, the

‘sweeping motion … as you part, again take your

result of much study and the exponent of much

hat off’. If stopped by a lady friend, ‘allow her to

grace’. The modern man, he sniffs ‘gets

terminate the interview and raise your hat quite

through it in a couple of seconds’.

off as you take leave’. On the other hand, if ‘a

56

Worries about tipping hats to ladies

stranger lady addresses you … touch your hat

replaced tipping them to superiors. After Helen

ceremoniously with some phrase of respect’. 59 In

snubs his efforts at gentility, Kipps becomes so

Henry James’s 1877 novel The American,

nervous he tips his hat to ladies everywhere.

Christopher Newman exploits convention when

Etiquette claimed to aid ‘the smooth running

the aristocratic Bellegardes cut him in a Paris

of society’, but applying rules was tricky: ‘A

park: ‘Newman stepped in front of them … he

gentleman should not raise his hat to a lady

lifted his hat slightly’; 60 fiercely punctilious, they

until she has accorded him [a bow]. When a

are obliged to stop and hear him out.

gentleman returns the bow of a lady with

‘Ah, the hat-raising!’ marvels Willis, ‘we had

whom he is slightly acquainted he should do so

to make toppers with reinforced brims to bear

… very slightly raising his hat from his head.’ If

the strain for gentlemen in Mayfair.’61 Willis

she is a friend, ‘he should raise his hat with

himself had a fine hat-raising moment. Walking

more freedom of action’ [61]. If he meets a

across Hyde Park one morning in 1901, he

gentleman friend walking with a lady with

noticed an open carriage: ‘my eyes fell on the

whom he is unacquainted, ‘he should not raise

occupant and I recognized the King … I clumsily

his hat, but nod to his friend’. Gentlemen ‘do

raised my hat. He instantly acknowledged my

not raise their hats in recognition of each other,

salute by raising his.’62 Even Kipps succeeds in

but simply nod’.

57

Mrs. Humphry in Manners

this gesture: ‘he hesitated for a moment and

For Men, however, insists ‘the hat must be

suddenly did great things with his hat. The hat!

raised even in saluting a familiar friend if a) he

The wonderful hat of our civilization!’63 Still

is accompanied by a lady, and b) when one is

wonderful, still civilized, the Irish Times

oneself accompanied by a lady’.

reported that the Windsor town crier’s main

58

Hat honour in an American guide of 1859

task on the 2014 visit of the Irish president

seems especially taxing: upon meeting social

to Britain was to remind councillors to take

inferiors, for example, one should, ‘without

their hats off when Mr. and Mrs. Higgins, the

bowing or touching the hat, salute in a kindly

Queen and Prince Philip passed by in a

voice’. When meeting ladies and gentlemen

horse-drawn carriage.

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hats

Courtesy calls meant entering the home,

Robinson, is a bookbinder. He protests, ‘why

and what to do with hats indoors opened up

then does she have him in her drawing room –

another Pandora’s box of potential faux pas.

announced like an ambassador, carrying a hat

The Princess Casamassima of 1888 is Henry

in his hand like mine?’64 Hyacinth has,

James’s most class-conscious novel and

however, been brought up in working-class

accordingly rich in headgear. Prince

London – a class, as Willis says, that were

Casamassima, wondering whether those

sticklers for etiquette.

processing in and out of his estranged wife’s

James does not mock Hyacinth with

London house are her lovers or tradesmen, is

conduct manuals. Hyacinth knows that a

told that the current young man, Hyacinth

gentleman ‘should take his hat and stick in his hand with him into the drawing room and hold

60 ‘Making the Bow’,

them until he has greeted the mistress of the

B. Dandridge & L-P.

house. He should either place them on a chair

Boitard, The Rudiments

or table or hold them in his hand according to

of Genteel Behaviour, London, 1737.

whether he feels at ease or the reverse until he

right

takes his leave.’65 Mrs. Humphry elaborates: ‘The reason for carrying the hat … is based on the supposition that the masculine caller feels himself privileged … ready to leave should he not find his presence acceptable.’66 Hyacinth’s innate grace confuses the prince, but the princess is not pleased: ‘you’ve nothing of the people about you today’, she complains. To suggest that, invited as a guest, he might present himself in working mode is insulting: ‘you do regard me as a curious animal’, 67 he says. She wants him to act the proletarian to gratify her image as class rebel and annoy the prince, who reasonably wonders if the bookbinder has designs on his status, his silver or his wife. One might expect the blacksmith Joe Gargery, in Charles Dickens’s 1862 novel Great

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etiquet te and cl ass

Expectations to be as amusing with hats as

women and then for servants and the elderly.

61 ‘Salutations’,

Kipps; dress in Dickens’s novels is after all

There were caps for morning that should be

Manners, Culture and

often used as a comic, identifying quirk. Joe is

plain, and more elaborate afternoon affairs for

in London to see Pip, who is being ‘improved’,

receiving. For making calls a bonnet was

and has neglected his home in the country

required and later, a hat. But it was difficult for

with his sister and her husband, Joe. ‘“I’m glad

manuals to prescribe style; sometimes a

to see you, Joe”, Pip says, “give me your hat”.

current mode was singled out for approval or,

But Joe, taking it up carefully with both hands

more often, disapproval.

… wouldn’t hear of parting with that piece of property’ and looks for somewhere to put it.

Dress, Richard Wells, New York, 1891. Below

From the late eighteenth century women played a larger part in the public scene than

Increasingly irritated, Pip watches the hat’s progress, toppling off every resting place, ‘Joe rushing at it and catching it neatly as it dropped; merely stopping it midway, beating it up and humouring it in various parts of the room.’ But Dickens suddenly pulls the rug from under our feet. Joe takes his hat and says ‘“you and me is not two figures to be together in London … I’m wrong in these clothes.”’68 In a sobering volte-face, Pip realizes that any breach of courtesy is his; he has reacted with a snobbery in which the amused reader has been complicit.

Etiquette for L adies Indoors or out, and less indicative of status, hat etiquette for women was not as fraught as that for men. In the eighteenth century women wore caps, as ‘undress’ (informal) or as ‘dress’ (formal), or as outdoor wear under hats. Elite women seem to have felt freer to appear bare-headed. During the nineteenth century caps became wear for married or mature

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hats

they once had. There were therefore places and

Church was the site of much hat activity and

occasions when their appearance – and

debate, but being neither a private nor public

especially their headgear – became subject to

space, only sui generis, rules were initially

rules, spoken or understood. But until the

uncertain. As we have seen, the prohibition on

1960s one principle seemed inviolate: no

men’s hats in church does not go back far –

woman went out of the home without a hat.

both sexes wore hats in church until

Gwen Raverat, recalling a 1890s childhood,

seventeenth century, acting as though it were a

hated hats. ‘We should catch cold’, the

public space. The religious tolerance of

grown-ups told her, ‘or get sunstroke if we

post-Civil War Britain did not extend to hats,

went bareheaded. But the real reason was that

however, and St. Paul’s strictures were

it was proper.’ Irene in The Forsyte Saga uses

invoked: the heads of men in church should be

convention as a weapon when, having asked

uncovered, those of women covered in

Soames for a divorce, he refuses to listen: ‘“For

acknowledgement of the Lord’s Day. Exceptions

Gods’ sake don’t let’s have any of this sort of

could be made: the Canons of 1604 stipulated

nonsense. Get your hat on and come and sit in

that ‘No man shall cover his head in the Church

the Park”… “Then you won’t let me go?”’ she

or chapel in the time of Divine Service, except

asks. ‘“Understand … once and for all, I won’t

that he have some Infirmity; in which case let

have you say this sort of thing. Go and get your

him wear a Night-cap or Coif.’71 Men removed

hat on!” She did not move.’ Finally giving in,

hats at the door, and in the nineteenth century

‘he flung the door wide … without a hat or

were asked not to leave them in the font. Hat

overcoat went out into the Square …

pegs can be found on some church walls and in

“Suffering! When will it cease, my

Amish meeting houses in America, but

suffering?”’69 – a gesture so uncharacteristic of

generally men were expected to organize

this conventional, undemonstrative man that

headgear as best they could.

one almost feels for him.

Dickens loved Sundays where ‘the fine bonnet of the working-man’s wife or the feather

Sunday Best

bedizened hat of his child [showed] no

Hats were especially ‘proper’ on occasions

inconsiderable evidence of good feeling’.72

associated with church: Sunday services,

Church was a place to see and be seen, a

weddings and funerals. Raverat recalls two

weekly opportunity for display. Fred Willis

girls on a Sunday morning with ‘beribboned,

recalls ‘a dreadful predilection for black and

top-heavy hats stuck on the top of hair they

sombre colours’,73 but Thomas Hardy’s country

had spent so long in frizzling and puffing out’.70

girl likes ‘a nice flare-up about my head o’

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etiquet te and cl ass

Sundays’.74 As Styles argued in relation to

rising to the waist for the next six. British

62 Mourning Bonnet,

eighteenth century dress, fashion was not

Manners and Rules of Good Society of 1892,

1910, USA.

confined to the wealthy; with increasing

while allowing that etiquette was now less

mechanization and cheaper straw plait from

strict, advises two years mourning for a widow:

Below

the Far East, a working girl could afford an occasional Sunday ‘flare-up’. In the eyes of one’s neighbours there was a line to be drawn between respect and fashion in church. Dick, betrothed to Fancy Day in Hardy’s 1872 novel Under the Greenwood Tree, is uneasy when he sees her feathered hat on a Sunday when he cannot attend: ‘You’ve never dressed so charmingly before’, he says. Others are more blunt: ‘“disgraceful! Curls and a hat and feather! ... A bonnet for church always!” said sober matrons.’75 As a barometer of its owner’s mood, the hat suggests that Fancy has found more interesting fish to fry than Dick.

Mourning In England until the late nineteenth century it was the custom at funeral services for the clergyman’s hat, swathed in black silk, to be hung behind the pulpit where it remained until the sermon had ended. Undertakers still wear black silk top hats at funerals, even when an undertaker – as now often happens – is a woman. The black top hat persisted as correct mourning dress into the twentieth century. Nineteenth century American mourning was more oppressive than British: The Ladies’ Home Journal in 1891 decreed that widows be shrouded in a floor-length veil for three months,

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hats

‘the widow’s cap should be worn for a year and

meet her in church without her bonnet’,78

a day’ [62]. George Eliot, in her novel

Thomas Hardy says of one of his cannier

Middlemarch, set in 1832 but published in the

peasants. A bride would of course be the one

1870s when rules were relaxing, describes

female in church without a bonnet. According

Dorothea Casaubon, who, freed from an

to Modern Etiquette of 1890, wreath and veil

unhappy marriage by the death of her husband,

were indispensable; for quiet weddings,

swathes herself in excessive black. Her grim

however, a bonnet and veil were correct [63]. In

cap, so inappropriate to the summer season

William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Amelia Sedley,

and so inauthentic, irritates her sister Celia,

fallen on hard times, is married in ‘a straw

who removes it. When Dorothea then has a

bonnet with a pink ribbon; over the bonnet she

sharp exchange with a visitor, Celia slyly

had a veil of white Chantilly lace’.79 Amelia,

notes, ‘taking your cap off made you more like

however, is allowed a white bonnet when she

yourself in more ways than one’.77

finally falls into Dobbin’s arms – in the street,

76

A grim coda to the association of black

not church, so etiquette is maintained. The

headgear with death was the judges’ black cap,

focus of weddings has now shifted from church

put on when the death sentence was

service to an evening party, top hats are

pronounced in an English court. Etiquette

disappearing and fascinators replace hats,

bizarrely demanded that if the monarch were

though large confections can still be seen:

present, the black cap should be worn, however

‘huge muffs of horror’, 80 as Nancy Mitford

trivial the offence.

called them.

W eddings

H ats or Bonnets

We have given up hats generally, but weddings

There was some jostling between hats and

still awake some need for hats. This hat-urge

bonnets in the second half of the nineteenth

started after the Marriage Act of 1753 when

century. Fancy Day’s feathers are excessive,

weddings in England had to be performed in

but it is the fact she is wearing a hat, not a

church before witnesses; church custom

bonnet, in church that shocks. Though the

demanded headgear for both sexes, with men’s

terms ‘hat’ and ‘bonnet’ are often

hats to be removed at the door. Weddings used

interchangeable, the bonnet concealed much of

to take place early in the day, and bonnets –

the hair and face and tied under the chin. In

later, hats – were therefore appropriate for

Henry James’s Roderick Hudson, Mme.

those attending. ‘He knew how far he could go

Grandoni, the heroine’s chaperone, calls on

with a woman and yet keep clear of having to

Roderick’s mother: ‘She is very old to wear a

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hat’, Mrs. Hudson remarks, ‘I should never dare to wear a hat.’81 In the 1870s, the period of James’s novel, hats had almost replaced bonnets, but Mrs. Hudson, a conservative New Englander, feels bonnets to be proper for those of a certain age.

Place and Occasion Except for tea parties or brief courtesy calls, where it would be difficult to take them off and still trickier to put them on again, women did not wear hats indoors. In a correspondence on hat etiquette in The Daily Telegraph of November 2015, a reader recalled an aunt who kept a hat by her front door: if a caller was unwelcome she was just going out; if welcome, she had just come in. The growth of department stores, hotels, restaurants and

that after seven o’clock only prostitutes wore

63 Wedding bonnet,

exhibition halls in the nineteenth century

hats.

Happy Homes and

blurred the lines between indoors and out,

How to Make Them,

Advice about how to wear hats in hotels

complicating etiquette. Joining The Daily

was helpful and Mrs. Sherwood commended

Telegraph’s hat correspondence, a reader

‘the etiquette of raising the hat on the

recalls his father telling him that hats were to

staircases and in the halls of a hotel as

be removed ‘in the female departments of

gentlemen pass ladies’, 83 but in hotel parlours

major stores’82 – requiring considerable

she believes hats were seldom worn. For

legerdemain when shopping, one imagines. The

garden parties hats were correct for host and

paintings of Walter Sickert or Toulouse Lautrec

guests; boat decks counted as ‘outdoors’, as

of the period make it clear that in France and

did picture galleries. Thomas Hardy’s upwardly

Britain at least hats were worn by both sexes in

mobile heroine of 1876, Ethelberta, takes her

cafés, bars and music halls. Such louche

artisan brothers to the annual Royal Academy

associations, however, meant that in the 1930s,

Exhibition in London. Conscious of exalted

when milliner Aage Thaarup wanted to design

company, the brothers present a ‘too reverential

hats for dining out, a maître d’hôtel told him

bearing towards the well-dressed crowd …

J. W. Kirton, London, c. 1880.

above

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hats

walking with their hats in their hands with the

Top hats give clues to status and character in a

contrite bearing of meek people’.

composition packed with narrative incident;

84

For the theatre a top hat was obligatory. But once inside, where to put it? For gentlemen the collapsible ‘gibus’ top hat solved the problem

bonnets predominate, from modest to dubiously extravagant. A key scene in George Moore’s novel of

and was stowed under the seat; for women

1894, Esther Waters, takes place at Epsom, and

‘either a bonnet or hat may be worn’, but might

owes much to Frith’s painting. Having known

be removed ‘in consideration of those who sit

little but poverty, Esther is for once solvent and

behind’. 85 This became an issue with the

has bought ‘a white hat tastefully trimmed

gigantic hats of the 1890s. Jewelled hair

with lilac and white lace’ for Derby Day. Her

ornaments then became popular and James’s

husband William was ‘very wonderful in his

Princess Casamassima in her theatre box

green necktie, yellow flowers and white hat’.

satisfies etiquette with ‘two or three diamond

They set off for the novel’s one brief, bright

stars’. Not an option open to all, but flowers

holiday moment when hats and pleasure were

could lend a similar sense of occasion.

unconstrained, in an omnibus ‘filled with fat girls in pink dresses and yellow hats’. 87

T he R acecourse

Nowadays etiquette requires ‘smart casual

‘The Derby, Ascot, Goodwood and the Eton

dress’ in the stands; in the Queen’s Stand and

and Harrow Match’, Fred Willis remembers,

Grandstand, ‘ladies are asked to wear a

‘what did all this mean to me? More hats to

fascinator or hat’; gentlemen, ‘grey morning

iron, more smashed toppers to repair,’ he says

dress with a top hat’.

happily. Old Boys and pupils at the Eton and

Royal Ascot, as its name suggests, is

Harrow Match expected to have their hats

another matter. Founded by Queen Anne in

smashed, but for the ladies (even in 1969) ‘your

1711, it has become a fashion focus of the

best summer dress’ was required, ‘with a hat’86

London season. The most prestigious race is

– unmolested one hopes. Jeans may now be

the Gold Cup, when hats as much as horses

worn to the opera but race meetings for some

compete. A guide to ‘modern manners’

reason still call for hats and attract publicity

suggests that the best hat should be kept for

for the most striking confections. Etiquette at

this: ‘Well-known Ascot goers have been seen

first seems to have been an agreement to dress

to wear the same dress twice, but they will still

in one’s ‘best’. William Frith’s painting Derby

wear different hats.’88 Access to the Royal

Day of 1858 is a panorama of Victorian society

Enclosure is restricted and dress codes

and contains all the headgear of the period.

enforced: grey top hats for men and a day dress

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etiquet te and cl ass

and hat for women. Fascinators (much despised

wear a hat at his inauguration, but the damage

by some milliners as apologies for hats) have

had been done. Hats were not finished, but

recently been banned. But hats, sublime or

1965 marked the end of a hat era. Immigrants

ridiculous, flourish, and have so focused media

from other cultures were challenging tradition,

attention that horses become of secondary

and Australia was forming an identity that

interest [64]. Harry Graham’s comic advice

favoured classlessness and informality.

manual of 1912 recounts hat-panic when

Ironically it was the English Jean Shrimpton

Graham and his friends, on their rowdy way to

who had provided a turning point.

Ascot, lose their toppers: ‘it was obviously

But in an effort to keep racing alive in

impossible for any self-respecting person to

Australia, Black explains, the young are now

walk about the Enclosure in a frock coat

encouraged to see the Melbourne Cup as a

surmounted by a straw hat!’ Officials were

festive fashion event that includes hats.

rude, spectators jeered and their conduct was

Shrimpton had attacked conformism; she now

attributed ‘to a sudden conversion to

looks rather heroic, like Liberty Leading the

Socialism’. 89

People. Fashion may contravene etiquette, but

If President Kennedy was said to have dealt

contraventions may then, in their turn, become

men’s hats a mortal blow in 1960, Jean

the new fashion. So hats, having for a time

Shrimpton’s appearance in 1965 at the

disappeared, have been reborn, not as

Melbourne Cup marked a crisis for fashion hats

obligatory but as fun and celebratory – not only

and the passing of a generation. Hats had been

in Melbourne, but at Ascot and Epsom. Having

in decline since the 1930s, but it took these

escaped the minefield of etiquette, men’s hats

two celebrities to dramatize the fact. Proving

are worn according to individual whim,

that less is more, Shrimpton, who had been the

anywhere and anyhow. An older generation

focus of media attention as a top model,

may wince, but trilbies and fedoras are seen

appeared, hair blowing in the wind, hatless,

indoors and out, in the street, at parties and

gloveless, sleeveless, stockingless (it was hot)

concerts. What changed for hats were

in a mini-dress against a sea of hats at

attitudes; they are now worn for pleasure and

Melbourne’s biggest social event [65]. She

effect, not for status or respect. Why go hatless

made everyone else, as Prudence Black says,

to Ascot when it is an excuse for a harmless bit

look ‘old and dowdy’. The Lady Mayoress

of dressing up?

fumed: ‘not wearing a hat or gloves on Saturday ... [was] very bad manners’.

90

At the end of The Forsyte Saga, Soames She did

in fact wear a hat the next day, as Kennedy did

goes to Ascot. His daughter Fleur gets him a grey top hat: ‘they’re all the go this year’.

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hats

64 Racegoers at

cap’. 92 But if etiquette was indelibly imprinted

Ladies’ Day, Royal

on the British psyche, then when it went, daily

Ascot, 2011.

right

life could be tricky – especially so in banks, it

65 Jean Shrimpton at

seems. In the correspondence on hat etiquette

the Melbourne Cup,

in The Daily Telegraph of 2015, a reader’s father

1965.

opposite

had told him that, ‘when entering a bank you could keep your hat on – if you were in credit’. 93 Back in the 1930s a letter to The Times addressed the problem: ‘I cannot keep my hat on in a bank, though I know my courtesy is often taken for eccentricity. What has the poor banker done, that he should be insulted?’ – or indeed that his bared head might signal an overdraft? And there was the question of Soames is confused: ‘“White elephant”, he said

courtesy to ladies. The same correspondent

“Can’t think what made Fleur get me the

offers a solution: ‘I used to smile (I hope)

thing.”’91 Caught up in the excitement he

charmingly and incline my head in … a

begins to cheer despite himself; taking off his

lingering, slightly fond manner … the method

hat he looks inside it as if to discover its secret.

still works.’94 Fleur, in the final pages of The

Unloved in the first part of the Saga, Soames

Forsyte Saga, ‘smiled and the old boy cocked

has grown sympathetic. Here, at the last, he

his hat at her. They all cocked their hats at her,

forgets the past and responds to the moment.

and that was pleasant?’95 Might she have

His hat is not just correct, but ‘all the go’. He

preferred ‘a lingering, slightly fond manner’?

has worn the right thing, done the right thing

She seems uncertain, but in any event she

and is finally not so bad. The ‘significant trifle’,

smiles. In 2011, wearing, I felt, a rather dashing

has returned, like the Forsytes themselves –

Stetson, I myself was walking along Piccadilly

the same but changed.

when a gentleman – whom I had never met – walking towards me, touched the brim of his

Survival

bowler and said ‘Good morning, Madam’; it

George Bernard Shaw believed acquired

was pleasant and I smiled. Hat spoke to hat in

notions of propriety were stronger than natural

an exchange of courtesies between strangers, a

instincts: a British officer could never be

bright moment on a grey morning – the hat

induced ‘to walk through Bond Street in golfing

method can still work.

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etiquet te and cl ass

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5 bowlers and ‘bergÈres’

I

n this chapter I shall trace the evolution and some of the later uses of two distinctive hats – hats that identified their wearers but developed identities of their own, identities that

might be projected onto the wearers or be read at a ‘second degree’ as ironic self-mockery. The hard felt bowler and the wide-brimmed straw ‘bergère’ are iconic men’s and women’s hats, immediately recognizable, in and out of favour but never deposed. Both have certain associations: the bowler evokes businessmen – especially British – of modern life; the bergère the real or imaginary country life of the past.

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hats

66 Foreman in a

The courtesies between the bowler-hatted

have had a wider brim, a higher crown and

bowler, 1937.

gentleman and myself at the end of chapter

been any colour, his hat was a classic

four were mildly ironical. We were, and we

descendant of the black Lock bowler of 1850.

knew we were, anomalies. In London he might

Outside London, the hat would have looked

be a civil servant or financier, defiantly

odd, possibly worn by an old-fashioned

conservative and British. But he could equally

foreman,1 but as out-of-date by 2000 as a cloth

have been playing the part, for by 2000 the

cap on a worker [66].

Below

bowler had become ‘costume’, no longer everyday dress. Unlike my Stetson that might

T he Bowler Just who was responsible for the first momentous bowler has been disputed. In the countryside gentry on horseback had long worn hard, round hats; workers had semi-hard ‘thanets’. But according to the Lock family historian, it was Thomas Coke of Holkham who found that his gamekeepers’ thanets became entangled in branches and fell off – the pursuit of poachers could be eventful. So in 1850 he went to Mr. Lock with his requirements: a hard, low-crowned, snug hat from which branches (or cudgels) could glance off easily. Lock sent directives to the Southwark hatter William Bowler, where new felting machinery aided experiment. Coke tested the result by jumping on it. Mr. Lock ‘withstood the shock. And so did the hat. Mr. Coke repeated his experiment. The hat remained round, domed, undented. It would do.’2 Lock called it ‘the Coke’ after the customer for whom it was created; but I imagine shape had much to do with its final name. Lock in fact improved on already existing forms: the billycock, the pot and their predecessor, the

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bowlers and ‘bergÈres’

thanet. Gangs known as ‘bullies’ wore the billy

lived in a century without aeroplanes and cars’.

or bullycock; it was also a Cornish miner’s hat

The bowler hat floats above but connects these

made by William Cock. A character in George

disparities, and while acquiring new meanings

Moore’s Esther Waters looks ‘disreputable in

– Sabina wears it with her underwear – all

his billycock hat’. The pot, worn by workers

former meanings ‘would resonate together with

and foremen, is sometimes used as a synonym

the new one’4 : past with present, gravity with

for a top hat, but its domed crown makes it

frivolity. Kundera’s image sums up the bowler’s

more of a tall bowler. In Esther Waters, after

fruitful contradictions: volatility and

Derby Day ‘rough fellows lay asleep … with

constancy, lightness and weight.

their pot hats over their faces’ – difficult in a 3

topper. Coke said the gamekeeper’s new hat would

Somebody or Nobody How did this persistent hat move from

‘do’ and it ‘did’ in fact not only for gamekeepers

semi-feudal status on an English gamekeeper

but also for princes – and cab drivers, street

to become a global symbol of middle-class

vendors, dandies, bank clerks, foremen, shop

business and finance – its strongest

assistants and ladies on horseback. It crossed

resonance? ‘It became clear to me’, Fred

continents, becoming a ‘derby’ in America, a

Robinson says in his study of the bowler, ‘that I

‘melon’ in France and was worn by men in

was studying modern life by tracing the

kimonos in Japan. But as it gained status,

meanings of this sign.’5 Together with the

darker sides emerged: royalty, politicians and

modern suit that began as informal country

financiers wore it, but so did dictators, thugs

wear, the bowler moved socially up and

and Filthy Capitalists – or those caricatured as

city-wards; but being quickly adopted by all

such. As an image the bowler is simple, but in

classes, it also moved downwards. A working

fact its subtleties were legion, as are the

hat for miners and gamekeepers on the one

meanings that pass under it.

hand, it had aristocratic connotations on the

In Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable

other. An article in The Hatter’s Gazette of 1878

Lightness of Being, Sabina, fleeing oppression,

notes that ‘artisans and labourers wear caps

takes a bowler with her. ‘It returned again and

and billycocks as they please … whenever we

again, each time with a different meaning, and

can we fly to low hats for comfort.… What we

all the meanings flowed through the bowler hat

want is closely approached by the huntsman’s

like water through a river bed’; it reminds her

black velvet cap, an oval top … not easily

of love games with Franz, as well as being a

dislodged … aristocratic in its associations.’6

memento of her father and grandfather, ‘who

Though it came to represent power and was

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hats

67 Georges Seurat,

worn by royalty, it never quite symbolized

topper was still ‘the most gentlemanly article

Bathers at Asnières,

‘toffs’, as did the top hat; its origins were not

of a man’s attire’.7 A month later while they

forgotten and it quickly became comic

were calling the bowler ‘a rakish hat …

headgear in music hall, circus and film.

associated with punch, pugilism and wild

1884.

Below

Late nineteenth century Britain was finding the top hat irksome. The Hatter’s Gazette was

9780857851611_txt_app.indb 124

Mohock pranks’, 8 they also featured a photograph of five fine examples.

in two minds. They printed a complaint that

When the self-improving middle-class

the topper was ‘hot in summer, not warm in

became the dominant class of late nineteenth

winter … you cannot wear it in a railway

century Europe, the bowler became one of its

carriage; it is always in your way in a drawing

signal features: new, gentlemanly but

room … it will not save your skull in a fall … if

workmanlike. As Michael Carter points out,

it is good you are sure to have it taken from

‘the pared back, generalized form of male

you; if it is bad you are set down for a

headgear was a key element in embodying a

swindler’; but the Gazette maintained that the

number of positive meanings around the new

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bowlers and ‘bergÈres’

forms of male bourgeois work’. 9 Mobility, in

If millinery was to Degas what water lilies

trains, trams, buses and the new Underground,

were to Monet, then men’s hats were almost as

was important and the light sturdy bowler with

important to Georges Seurat. Free time, better

its sporting ancestry was better adapted to

wages and transport allowed a new urban class

action than the top hat. You cannot do much in

to take its leisure in the riverside outskirts of

a topper – which like Chinese foot-binding, was

Paris. In his painting Bathing at Asnières of

part of its point. A bowler, however, with the

1884 [67], Seurat might have mocked the petit

help of a conformateur follows the head’s

bourgeois in bowlers, wading in the river or

contours and is set down onto it, not perched on

sprawled on its banks. Relaxed but dignified,

top. Stability and order were important to the

they are without the stiff self-consciousness of

emerging class; the bowler was light and

the top hats that in La Grande Jatte verge on

modern but its solid form was manly, novel but

comedy. But Seurat’s pointilliste technique

not odd. The aristocracy, as Robinson says, ‘was

blurs faces; is he saying something about

not so much usurped as visually displaced’.

10

By 1880 advances in machine production and

anonymity and uniformity? Seurat’s bathers are tranquil spectators of their own pleasures, but

lower prices made the bowler widely available;

not, one feels, ill at ease. Their quiet

changes in retailing also contributed to its

weightiness neutralizes mockery – if the man

ubiquity. The Hatter’s Gazette of 1878 noted that

in a bowler hat is a nobody then ‘nobody has

provincial towns had often no ‘bona fide

arrived and is respectable’.12

hatters’. Gent’s outfitters stocked hats – not all

The frock coat and top hat of Mr. Pooter,

made by Lock, but at a distance, not so

office-clerk hero of George and Weedon

different. Ubiquity however created fears of

Grossmith’s illustrated Diary of a Nobody, had

uniformity: in a bowler you might be a city

begun to look passé in 1890s suburban London.

banker or a suburban nobody. In R. C. Sherriff’s

His pushy son Lupin, however, celebrates

novel of 1931, A Fortnight in September, Mr.

dismissal from office clerkdom with a new

Stevens, a city clerk, is upset when setting off

bowler. He takes up with Murray Posh of Posh’s

(in a cap) on holiday, and a neighbour joins him,

Three-Shilling Hats – ‘opening establishments

also on his way to the station: ‘What right had

in New York, Sydney and Melbourne’ – and

this commonplace man with his celluloid collar

lands a paying job in a ‘firm of the future’.13

and bowler hat … to blend with them? He was

Bent on becoming Somebody, Lupin in a jacket

going to London – to an office.’11 For just two

and debonair bowler snubs his embarrassing

weeks, Mr. Stevens badly needs not to be a man

parent [68]. Fred Willis would have called

in a bowler hat.

Lupin’s bowler ‘smart’ – too smart. It signals

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hats

there when discussing hats in entertainment. The businessman’s bowler, however, continued to flourish in Europe and America as much as in Britain, leader of the industrial world. Japan, having opened its markets to the West in the 1860s, saw that not only must industry and commerce westernize, but so must the national image. Japanese ladies squeezed into corsets while men, often finding frock coats and trousers tricky, wore their modern bowlers with the comfortable kimono. In Steven Sondheim’s musical of 1976, Pacific Overtures, set at the opening of Japan to the West in the 1860s, an ambitious young Japanese man worries over the process of becoming westernized in a song titled ‘A Bowler Hat’. At a loss, he contemplates his too-grand house, his fine wines, his umbrella stand and himself in a bowler hat, but concludes he must ‘accommodate the times’. The occidental semantics of the bowler would have meant little to him in Japan of the 1860s. The whole thing was puzzling, but wearing the hat was accepted to ‘accommodate’ 68 Lupin Pooter, Diary

membership of a new business class, but Lupin

of a Nobody, 1891.

is a ‘masher’: cocky and modish, his hat is

Above

‘light’ and not, one feels, an indication of future

and World War I helmets complicated its code,

success.

but despite other styles such as the Homburg

expansionist times [69]. Bowlers looked unsettlingly like helmets

and trilby, it remained popular post-war; after

Nationalisms and War

the top hat it was the dressiest style. More

By the early years of the new century the

than just an item of everyday wear, it attained

bowler had left the city and gone into show

symbolic status as quintessentially British.

business, and I shall be touching on its role

The hero of Theodore Dreiser’s American

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bowlers and ‘bergÈres’

Tragedy of 1925 thinks a man in a ‘black derby pulled low over his eyes … [is] an English duke or something’.14 Gudrun, in D. H. Lawrence’s novel Women in Love, of the same date, asks ‘who can take political England seriously? ... Who cares a button for our national ideals any more than for our national bowler hat? … it is all old bowler hat.’ She has a stormy affair with industrialist Gerald Crich (certainly bowlerhatted), but is also drawn to Loerke, a German artist, who is contemptuous of money, Gerald and hats: ‘money is lying about at one’s service … Gerald will give you a sum … I needn’t wear a hat at all, only for convenience.’15 Though voicing seemingly progressive views, Loerke’s scorn presages the German intelligentsia’s demonization of the Weimar Republic. If in Germany the bowler developed uneasy associations with British mercantilism, its simple line and practicality suited the Bauhaus ethos. In the instability of the later Weimar years, however, it came to represent capitalist corruption. In Erich Kästner’s children’s story Emil and the Detectives of 1929, the businessman-villain wears a bowler

Jewish business class stood for was vilified.

69 Japanese Boy

– part comic, part sinister. Very minor

Bowler-hatted monsters illustrated in an

with bowler, ca. 1890.

adjustments would tip such images over the

anti-Semitic children’s book, The Poisonous

Above

edge, for Jews – invariably represented as

Mushroom, were as bad as any imagined by the

bowler-hatted – had come to dominate German

Brothers Grimm [70].

16

finance and retail sectors. As the Weimar

The bowler did not get much ‘heavier’ than

Republic disintegrated, anti-capitalism slid all

this. But it is characteristic that, freed from

too easily into anti-Semitism. In Nazi Germany

finance the hat became ‘light’. Lightness is not

the bowler disappeared; all that the hat and the

a quality one associates with the military, but

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hats

wonder why so many businessmen, young and old and smiling, are marching in perfect military formation. A former Brigade officer explained: ‘officers off-duty were required to wear a bowler and carry a rolled umbrella in London at all times. This was a deeply respected tradition. On one occasion I was driving my open-topped car into London. On reaching South Kensington I removed my trilby and replaced it with my bowler. The “London suit” is still a tradition at memorial parades.’17 The ‘London suit’ is then uniform and not-uniform – ‘off-duty’ but ‘required’; the bowler-hatted men are here neither at war nor in business. All former meanings of the bowler hat, as Kundera says, ‘resonate together with the new one’. These men are parading in memory of those who (in helmets) died that normality (in bowlers) might survive – a ‘heavy’ resonance. But the perfectly choreographed spectacle of hundreds of men marching in bowler/helmets, sporting umbrella/rifles, is also light-hearted and entertaining. These aspects coexist without mockery or contradiction; meanings flow through the bowler hats ‘like water through a river-bed’. 70 Illustration from

every year in May, past and present officers of

The Poisonous

the Household Brigade in suits, bowler hats

Stage and Screen

and umbrellas march through London’s Hyde

The bowler’s role in entertainment developed

Park in a Memorial Parade [71]. In early

during the early years of the American cinema.

summer, among grass and trees, there is a

A key item of Chaplin’s costume, it also

buoyant festivity about the event that owes

perched perilously on the heads of ‘The Boys’,

much to the massed bowlers – spectators must

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy [72]. Chaplin’s

Mushroom, Julius Streicher, Berlin, 1938.

Above

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hat represents his indomitable if put-upon

71 Household

persona; it gets knocked off but is always

Brigade, 2014. Getty Images.

restored. Laurel and Hardy’s badges of

Above

respectability are desperately clutched and

72 Laurel and Hardy,

often lost. In bowlers they move pianos and

ca. 1940.

Left

paint houses – badly. Their dignity is unfounded, their ambition hopeless, but they believe bowlers lend conviction. At the end of Hats Off, their first film together, they sit in a heap of hats from which they extract flattened bowlers. Nearly a century later, in a crime novel, a frustrated detective inspector ‘did that Stan Laurel gesture with his hat, flapping it on his chest in a mock mournful, comic gesture’.18 The bowler’s semantics had now become so fluid that, though recognizable even when flat,

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bowlers and ‘bergÈres’

there is no longer a single meaning. On Laurel

bowler-hatted men. If hats are a disguise

73 Poster of René

and Hardy it might represent the American

convention, Magritte had much to conceal.

Magritte’s ‘Son of

will to succeed. In Britain at the same period

Man’, 1964.

Magritte’s sleek images belong to

the bowler tumbled socially in the smutty

advertising’s fantasy worlds; his weightless

singing act of northern, working-class

men escape into dreamscapes, other lives. In

entertainer George Formby, which has a

his self-portrait, The Son of Man, his face

lasting, if peculiarly British, appeal. Formby

under a bowler is partly obscured by an apple.

wore a bowler, but unlike city businessmen,

He believed that everything we see hides

perched it derisively on the back of his head.

another thing: behind the apple, under the

His song ‘The Bowler Hat my Grandad Left to

bowler there may be a financier, wage slave,

Me’ not only relegated the hat to the past but

criminal, artist – any or none of these. By

by deploying it as a cache-sexe in various

1964, however, the date of the portrait, the

risqué situations stripped it of respect. Scraps

bowler was ceasing to be everyday wear.

of dignity still attach to the bowlers of Samuel

Without ‘the energy of the modern’, Fred

Beckett’s two vagrants in his play Waiting For

Robinson says, it had become ‘the sign of

Godot of 1952, whose double act owes much

something past, almost a parody dress’.19

to Laurel and Hardy. Beckett insisted his

Magritte’s bowler-hatted men were not only

tramps wear bowlers; in his post-apocalyptic

parodic but by now everywhere recognized

landscape they might be fossils or survivors.

and replicated [73]; defying definition they

Opposite

join the hat’s other meanings in the cultural

Disguise Like Beckett’s tramps, the apparently

memory bank. Magritte’s titles are not afterthoughts. The

ordinary men in bowlers painted by René

Son of Man sounds blasphemous but if in the

Magritte between 1926 and 1966 seem to

past the Divine entered the everyday as a

exist outside reality, sailing up into blue skies

carpenter, why not now as a 1960s

and down onto city streets, or gazing at

businessman? Magritte said he wished his art

moons. Magritte was part of the surrealist

to evoke life’s mystery, but to be unknowable:

movement, but exhibitions in Paris and

‘Art for me is not an end in itself, but a means

Brussels were unsuccessful, his gallery

of evoking that mystery.’20 ‘This is not a pipe’,

closed and he returned to work in advertising,

he wrote on a painting of a pipe. ‘These are

remaining in occupied Belgium throughout

not businessmen’, he might have said; the

the war. Post-war he took to forging art as

image is not to be read at face value, but at

well as bank notes, all the while painting

second degree.

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hats

74 Malcolm McDowell

‘W ild Mohock Pranks’

and bowlers, both mocked and aped

as Alex in A Clockwork

A Bowler Hat Week was held in Britain in

respectability dressed in Edwardian style.

October 1950 to celebrate its centenary and

Bowlers meant money, power and

revive sales, but it was not a success. Late ’50s

entertainment; to this they added petty crime,

street fashions, however, borrowed from the

investing their mockery with menace. The

Edwardian era; audiences of 1962 knew that

bowler’s link to ‘wild Mohock pranks’, noted in

when traditional jazz clarinetist Acker Bilk, in

1878 by The Hatter’s Gazette, seemed suddenly

a striped waistcoat, picked up his bowler from

apt. The threat to society from disaffected

the piano top he would play his best-selling

youth formed the subject matter of Anthony

‘Stranger on the Shore’. Teddy Boys, a 1960s

Burgess’s dystopian novel of 1963, A Clockwork

subculture of urban youths in tight trousers

Orange, and in Stanley Kubrick’s film of the

Orange, 1971.

Below

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bowlers and ‘bergÈres’

novel in 1971, the ‘droogs’ – four teenagers

was John Cleese’s mad bureaucrat in bowler

– amuse themselves in acts of horrific violence.

and umbrella, in a sketch for the BBC series

They wear black hats: a Basque beret, an old

Monty Python’s Flying Circus in 1970 that was

beaver, a Laurel-and-Hardy high-crowned

the bowler’s quietus as normal headgear. It

bowler and on Alex, their leader, a smart

became ‘costume’ and if worn to work,

foreman’s bowler. The film’s farcical style

eccentric; the bowlers at the opening of the

enhanced its horror and in America it had a

new Lloyd’s Building in the City in 1986 were

limited release, but in Britain it proved so

salutes to the past.

controversial that Kubrick withdrew it, and it

Its disruptiveness saved it. When the bowler

was not released until after his death in 1999.

became obsolete as a marker of social and

Even so, Alex in his bowler at once entered and

professional status, the music and film world

remains in the cultural consciousness [74].

embraced it. Its prankishness inspired Frank

Kubrick’s film followed student riots and the

Zappa to wear one; the Riddler, villain of the

violence of anarchist groups in Europe and

Batman series, has a nasty green one; if

America. Along with assumptions about

Madonna favours Stetsons, Michael Jackson

behavioural norms, hats too were vanishing – a

liked bowlers. In 2014 Boy George wore a

not unconnected phenomenon. Bowlers

beautiful grey one – too beautiful to be entirely

survived in London for some years but again

a joke.

found a role in show business. The antiestablishment satires that entertained British

T he Bergère

audiences in the 1960s and 1970s used the

Asia, Tuscany or Hatfield?

bowler as class symbol to be mocked and

Like the bowler, the bergère is a basic

celebrated. For Patrick McNee as Steed,

hat-shape: a round shallow-crowned, wide-

gentleman-hero of the BBC comedy-thriller

brimmed straw, trimmed with ribbons or

series The Avengers, it was a comic prop. The

flowers. Unlike the bowler its first appearance

series had a futuristic element and Steed’s

is unrecorded; it seems to have existed always

image as the impeccable English gentleman

and at first was worn by both sexes. As its

could be read as caricature, a joke perhaps at

name suggests, the bergère (or ‘shepherdess’)

the expense of the frequently undressed and

like the bowler, had a work role, but the

hatless James Bond. The bowler must now be

Leghorn in fine Italian straw was equally a

read at ‘second degree’ as ironic. Steed is an

fashion item, a duality that continues. St.

efficient detective, but audiences understand

George, in Pisanello’s painting of 1445 The

he mocks the stereotypical British sleuth. It

Virgin Mary Appearing to Sts. Anthony and

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9780857851611_txt_app.indb 134

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bowlers and ‘bergÈres’

George, wears a magnificent broad-brimmed

Albert Museum’s straw hat of 1700, possibly of

75 Bergère hat, ca.

Tuscan straw. This is high fashion, not St.

Indian origin, has a tiny crown and a brim cut

1700, United States.

George playing peasant.

straight across at the back to rest on the

Opposite, top

shoulders [76]. As late Stuart hairstyles sat

76 Bergère hat, ca.

History of England of 1724, claims that ‘large

high over the forehead, hats like this one would

1700, UK, of Asian

broad-brimmed straw hats were worn by the

be worn towards the back of the head, pinned

The Hatter’s Gazette, citing Oldmixon’s

Court Beauties of Queen Anne’; hat

22

21

but the chip

origin.

Opposite, bottom

77 Bergère hat, UK,

to the hair.

with chintz lining, ca.

that Mrs. Pepys bought in rural Hatfield

1710.

near London in the 1660s would be unlikely

Shepherdesses

court wear. The Gazette is not always reliable,

‘Leghorns’ were flexible and adaptable; unlike

but its comments are intriguing. Also

the Asian openwork hats they could be lined,

intriguing is the survival in various museum

trimmed and bent according to taste. A fashion

Left

collections of no less than five late seventeenth/early eighteenth century hats of fine Asian straw of English provenance. At this period European trade with Asia and the Far East was growing and in Britain an increasingly consumerist and fashion conscious society was acquiring a taste for exotic tea, porcelain and silk and, it seems, hats. A wide-brimmed hat of Asian origin but worn in England, in the Colonial Williamsburg Museum in Virginia, United States, is dated ca.1700, and with its intricate design of linked oval medallions in grass straw and bamboo, must have been a desirable accessory [75]. Another, also of Asian origin in New York, comes in its own lacquer box. Far Eastern ceramics were often kept in boxes signed by the artist; without a box the object lost value. 23 This custom might have extended to an object as finely crafted as this. The Victoria and

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hats

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becomes especially desirable when it allows the wearer to indulge in make-believe and from the mid-seventeenth century portrait painters flattered their sitters with pastoral fantasies. As donors had joined saints around the Virgin in religious art, so court beauties now roamed Arcadia as rustic nymphs. Arcadia was charming, but a lady would want to clarify her social position. Sir Peter Lely painted Restoration court beauties, such as Lady Belasyse (1655) in ‘shepherdess’ style with sheep and crook accessories, but sumptuous gowns indicate status. Lady Belasyse’s silk-lined hat is similar to a Leghorn bergère [77] of circa 1710 in a private collection 24 whose wide brim is lined in pink Indian chintz that the wearer would want to display. Actress Peg Woffington’s tiny rose and ribbon trimmed bergère, however, perched saucily to one side of her coiffure in Joseph Highmore’s 1730 portrait [78] takes Arcadia with a pinch of salt and

78 Joseph Highmore,

The Hatter’s Gazette claims that, Queen

Peg Woffington, ca.

suggests bergères are becoming democratized.

Anne hats aside, it was not until the mid-

The Colonial Williamsburg Museum owns a

eighteenth century that ‘hats for ladies

portrait of Evelyn Bird [79], a young American,

affecting country simplicity became

79 Anon. Evelyn Bird,

who after an education in England returned

fashionable’, 25 referring to the burst of

ca. 1725, USA.

home in 1726. Before she left an unknown artist

popularity for bergères when they became

painted her as a shepherdess, holding a crook,

known as ‘Pamela’ hats after the heroine of

with a broad-brimmed, flower-trimmed hat in

Samuel Richardson’s best-selling novel of 1740.

her lap – perhaps fashionable at the court of

The maid Pamela, in the novel, assembles an

Queen Anne? Such ‘shepherdesses’ would have

outfit in which she plans to flee her employer,

had little contact with sheep beyond the dinner

choosing ‘home-spun clothes … [and] a little

table, but in their imaginations – and under

straw hat’ with ‘green strings’. 26 Highmore

their hats – they inhabit Arcadia.

exploited the boom for this popular novel in

1730.

opposite

above

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hats

80 Thomas

1744 with twelve paintings in which ‘country

Thomas Gainsborough’s 1748 portrait of Mr.

Gainsborough, Mr.

simplicity’ is represented in silk skirts and a

and Mrs. Andrews sitting amid their cornfields

muslin apron; one can read her pretty straw hat

[80]. Her hat – loosely beribboned and slightly

[40] – with blue strings – as marking either

battered – has an artless bucolic air, belied by

humble origins or upward mobility. To wear

hooped skirts and high-heeled shoes, unlikely

Pamela’s hat showed sympathy with her

in fields so realistic that they are still

propriety, modest good taste and tearful

identifiable as in Suffolk. Arcadia, sheep and

and Mrs. Andrews, 1748.

Below

81 Benjamin Nebot, The Curds and Whey Seller, Cheapside, c. 1750.

Opposite

‘sensibilité’. When Pamela’s virtue was

crook have been abandoned for native reality;

rewarded with a spectacularly successful

ribbons have replaced flowers, but the hat is

marriage she became the cynosure of the

still make-believe ‘shepherdess’.

aspiring middle classes. The novel has been credited with creating a fashion, but it simply

joined ‘Pamela’ as names for the style, invoking

gave a push to a hat already there – part of the

rural origins. John Styles and Aileen Ribeiro

27

phenomenon in dress.

note that the lack of a real English peasant

A rash of portraits of ladies in sweetly

class made it difficult to tell townees from

simple hats followed. Best-known perhaps is

countrywomen by their dress. During the

‘trickle upwards’

9780857851611_txt_app.indb 138

Along the way ‘dairymaid’ and ‘gypsy’

1/12/17 10:49 AM

eighteenth century Styles believes ‘ordinary Englishmen and women enjoyed unprecedented access to novel material things’; fashion was not limited to the upper classes but extended ‘to the working multitude who inhabited the opposite end of the social scale’. 28 ‘The poorest country girls’, a French visitor to England wrote in 1750, ‘drink tea, have bodices of chintz [and] straw hats upon their heads.’29 Things worn by the labouring class may serve also as work clothes. The big bergère worn by the central figure in Balthazar Nebot’s painting of 1730’s London, The Curds and Whey Seller, is her working hat [81]. She wears it over a substantial scarf as protection from the weight and spillage of the pail she would have carried on her head; the flat crown and cocked

spaces and amusement for all the family – as

brim is practical, but flatten the brim, add a

well as venues for amorous trysts. Richardson’s

ribbon and it becomes town wear. As Aileen

Pamela is famous for her ‘virtue’, but was also

Ribeiro notes, unlike her scruffy customers,

accused of manipulating ‘virtue’ to snare her

‘she wears the clean and modestly fashionable

man and, as is evident in Highmore’s portrait of

dress of the self-respecting working-girl’. 30

Peg Woffington, the hat had a come-hither side. Like the bowler, the bergère sent out ambiguous

Countess, M ilkmaid or M in x

messages: it could be a practical hat on a

Nebot’s dairymaid and her hat look robustly

flirty confection on a demi-mondaine like

authentic, but Francis Hayman’s milkmaids in

Woffington. Cynical Lady Davenant, in Maria

his painting of 1741, The Milkmaids’ Garland,

Edgeworth’s novel of 1834, Helen, looking back

wear bergères too dainty to be practical.

on her youth, remembers being ‘very romantic

Hayman drew on pastoral themes appropriate

… with the mixed ideas of a shepherdess’s hat

to his painting as part of the décor for London’s

and the paraphernalia of a peeress – love in a

Vauxhall Gardens. The gardens offered green

cottage and a fashionable house in town’. 31

working girl, a chic Leghorn on a countess or a

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bowlers and ‘bergÈres’

for a hat. 32 Middle-class fears were reflected

82 Katherine Read

O’Brien as if she were a peeress in his portrait

in satire directed at uppity servants who aped

(?), Polly Jones, 1769.

of 1762; she is cradling a lamb-like dog and

their betters. A huge bergère is central to John

Opposite

wearing a blue-ribboned bergère. Hairstyles

Collet’s painting of 1763, High Life Below

determine the way hats are worn as well as

Stairs [83]. A lady’s maid in silk skirts is

their shape and size, and after the small neat

having her hair powdered; big as a tabletop

styles of mid-century, hair began to climb,

and covered in satin and braid, her hat is

reaching dizzying heights in the 1770s. Polly

being trimmed with, of course, blue ribbon,

Jones [82], another celebrated courtesan,

and a plain straw hangs redundant on a back

advertises her appeal in her portrait of 1769,

wall. And in case we missed the point, a small

where a wisp of muslin glosses a considerable

girl, dressing her doll, leans on a copy of

décolleté ; she sends inviting smiles from under

Pamela.

Joshua Reynolds treats the courtesan Nelly

her sumptuous bergère garlanded with those

coiffure. Polly’s hat is larger, more fashionable

Development and Decline

than Nelly’s, but it is the style, the way it is

The 1750s and ’60s saw bergères at their best:

worn – and painted – that marks the grande

reasonable in size and ornament, they still

horizontale from the successful sexpot – though

related to their country cousins. Ways

was there much to distinguish Nelly from Polly

continued to be sought, however, to

beyond friendship with a better artist?

differentiate genteel bergères from common

virtuous blue ribbons, perched on a rising

Worn stylishly and judiciously trimmed, a

straws. ‘Straw’ in millinery can mean many

milkmaid’s hat could be a fashion item. At a

things: cereal straws, of course, and fine

distance good straw plait can resemble silky

Leghorn, but there is also horsehair, willow

Leghorn, as Lupin Pooter’s bowler was not

chip, raffia, paper, hemp, silk, cotton, palm

dramatically different from Lock’s. But as in the

from South America and ramie straw from the

case of the bowler, this could create unease: a

East. A bergère of linen and silk of 1750 in

fine lady – Marie Antoinette, for example –

the Victoria and Albert Museum, covered in

might play at milkmaids but her hat could not

tiny coloured feathers, demonstrates, as the

actually be a milkmaid’s, nor should a

museum says, ‘the 18th century trend for

milkmaid be able to wear her hat. The game is

taking items traditionally associated with

risky. As Styles makes clear, fashion was

working-class dress and transforming

available to workers who could pay – he

them into fashionable styles’ – far too fragile

records servants giving over 5/- (ca. £50 today)

for work.

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hats

84 John Collet, High Life Below Stairs, 1763.

Below

9780857851611_txt_app.indb 142

Another ploy was to make the hat difficult to wear: very big, steeply tilted or loaded with

and gigantic bergères. The hat’s reputation needed rescuing.

ornament – though this finally vulgarized it. Not only will Collet’s maid be unable to work in

R evolution and the H at

her hat, but she will also look silly. Millinery is

Marie Antoinette playing milkmaid in the Petit

often associated with feminine frivolity, or

Trianon at Versailles was indicative of a trend

worse: Polly Jones’s teasing tilt anticipated the

towards the English country style of dressing

way the bergère went from virtue to vice. As

that the French had begun to adopt even before

hairstyles became exaggerated so did hats.

the Revolution. The Queen’s modiste, Rose

In Thomas Rowlandson’s late eighteenth

Bertin, with her millinery, had made Paris the

century aquatints of Vauxhall Gardens, girls

centre of European fashion in the eighties, but

ply their trade in short skirts, bouffant hairdos

growing nervousness about aristocratic excess

1/12/17 10:49 AM

bowlers and ‘bergÈres’

had a moderating effect and Elisabeth

the ‘Dolly Varden’, worn by a character in

Vigée-Lebrun, in the plain gown of her

Charles Dickens’s novel of 1841, Barnaby

self-portrait [84] of 1782, anticipates simpler

Rudge. Dickens’s novels appeared in serial form

styles: a rustic straw sits straight on

and he often used dress quirks to imprint

unpowdered curls and its trim of meadow

characters on the memory. Dolly, a locksmith’s

flowers recalls earlier bergères. Lebrun’s

daughter, is immortalized in ‘a little straw hat

portrait in 1783 of Marie Antoinette in white

trimmed with cherry-coloured ribbons … the

muslin and a plain Leghorn hat was so

wickedest and most provoking head-dress that

shockingly unmajestic it had to be withdrawn,

ever malicious milliner devised’. 33 As the novel

but the look caught on, if not for long. Events

is set in the 1780s, Dickens is describing a Polly

overtook fashion and during and after the

Jones-type bergère, a style that was to

Revolution anything showy, anything

metamorphose in real life into the ‘Dolly

associated with court life – silks, velvets, lace,

Varden’.

tricornes, even bergères – was risky. Big hats

By 1850 many of Dickens’s novels had been

went out while straw, very democratic after all,

dramatized. Stage productions increased after

survived. In Lebrun’s portrait of 1797, Irina

his death in 1870, triggering a Dolly Varden

Vorontsova’s small bergère is young and chic,

mania. London’s Theatre Royal produced an

its pert cockade a nod to the Revolution. Set on

entertainment, The Dolly Varden Polka, in 1870.

the back of the head and tied under her chin, it

In America in 1872 a song celebrated her hat:

foreshadows bonnet styles.

‘Have you seen my little girl? She doesn’t wear a bonnet/She’s got a monstrous flip-flop hat

Dolly Varden

with cherry ribbons on it.’34 Dolly, as the song

Social confusion after the Revolution and

suggests, is a flirt, and the 1870s ‘Dolly Varden’

Napoleonic Wars brought about radical

style with short skirts, a big bustle and hat

changes in attitudes to fashion: the desired

tipped over the eyes, is that of a coquette.

look was ‘classical’. Hats were no longer

The Cunningtons describe ‘the Dolly

dominant; hair was cropped or worn close to

Varden or Shepherdess’ hat of the early ’70s as

the head and headgear aimed at an

‘a leghorn with a small crown, a wide limp

approximation of the classical profile. However,

brim, worn with a very forward tilt. The crown

one needs ‘a nice flare-up about the head’ at

was surrounded by ribbon trimming sometimes

times, as the girl in the Thomas Hardy novel

with “follow-me-lads” streamers.’ It was not, as

said. So the bergère returned as a fashion hat

they say, ‘worn by the best people’. 35 America,

in the seventies – again by way of fiction – as

however, took it up and in March 1872, Lord &

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hats

85 Elisabeth Louise

comic; an American journal in November 1872

Vigée Le Brun,

declared Dolly Varden dead: ‘the devotees have

Self-Portrait in a Straw

all forsaken her’. 37

Hat, 1783. © National Gallery, London.

In 1870s Britain hat styles went vertical and

Right

gypsy and Pamela hats left for the country and seaside. Lady Glencora, in Trollope’s novel of 1875, The Prime Minister, in mid-London season, sighs that she would ‘give worlds to be down at Matching with no one but the children and to go about in a straw hat and a muslin gown’38 – with this not-quite-authentic wish for the ‘simple life’ we are back with Gainsborough’s Mrs. Andrews. Country and sea air cleaned up the bergère’s image, but by the ’80s it was no longer high fashion. Marchioness Manson, in Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence, set in 1870s America, drifts about the seaside resort of Newport ‘extraordinarily festooned Taylor advertised a Dolly Varden hat ‘of white

[in] a limp Leghorn hat’. Eccentric Dorothy

chip straw, canary coloured ribbons, pink blush

Grey, in an Anthony Trollope novel of 1883,

roses, coquettishly turned-up brim’. But The

prefers country to town and is disinclined to

New York Times in April ran a dialogue where

marry. Her hat, ‘which from motives of

‘Mary’ warns a friend that Dolly Vardens ‘are

propriety she called her bonnet, gave her a

likely to be common and in ten days, between a

singular appearance … it was made generally

Grand Street bonnet and a Broadway one, you

of black straw and was round … fastened with

won’t be able to find a shred of difference’. 36

broad brown ribbons’. She possessed ‘two or

Back in Britain, following the publication of

three such hats … and she would wear them in

Eliza Lynn Linton’s anti-feminist essay of 1868,

London with the same indifference as in the

‘The Girl of the Period’, the Dolly Varden

rural neighborhood of her own residence’39 to

became the signature hat of this cigarette-

the detriment of her marital prospects. The

smoking minx, the target of much caricature

virtue of Pamela and the flirtatiousness of Dolly

[145]. A hat cannot long survive being thought

Varden were over.

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bowlers and ‘bergÈres’

Cartwheels

swirl round the crown to plunge through the

The fin de siècle was millinery’s greatest

brim, reappearing close to the face. It is as

moment – in all senses. Everyone wore hats,

though some robust pre-industrial shepherdess

and hats had never been bigger. Far Eastern

had seized whatever came to hand in Arcadia

imports had damaged local plait business, but

and made a hat – one that very much reflects

with advances in mechanization, manufacture

the originality of its wearer’s tastes [85]. When

boomed, and Luton and Dunstable prospered.

the Messels inherited a country house,

The Hatter’s Gazette of September 1894,

Nymans, they renovated it in medieval ‘arts

deploring men’s ‘cartwheels’ of summer 1893,

and crafts’ style to which Maud’s unique,

hoped ‘ladies will take [it] up … It would really

hand-crafted hat could be seen as a prelude.

be quite a taking thing if she should’.

Her descendants have appreciated her

Previously no one dreamt of wearing straw in

originality and style and the hat survives in

town, but ‘the fashionable straw hat is a

Birr Castle, Ireland.

gorgeous thing’ and besides the summer was 40

Heather Firbank, like Maud Messel, threw

hot. Cartwheels on men sound unlikely but the

nothing away. A wealthy young woman,

ladies did indeed take them up, smothered in

Heather invested in clothes with flair and

flora, fauna and feathers: Arcadia plundered,

bought the best. The London designer Henry

shepherdesses forgotten.

made her a black Leghorn ‘cartwheel’ of 1909

Or not quite. Two beautiful, wealthy young

whose enormous width sat straight on piled-up

Englishwomen chose important hats that while

hair, its brim supporting a mass of purple

impeccably fashionable, recalled Arcadia. In

flowers [86]. Its distinct shape, restrained

April 1898 Maud Sambourne married

colour and simple sprigs of heather (not a

stockbroker Leonard Messel. It was a society

coincidence) are surprisingly uncluttered. She

event and Maud’s wedding finery featured in

bought a cloche in 1920, a style quite different

the press along with her going-away hat ‘of

to the bergère, but with its cocked brim and

rustic straw most becomingly trimmed with

slightly battered flowers it still recalls Mrs.

branches of mauve lilac and draperies of

Andrews.

heliotrope chiffon’.

41

‘Rustic’ was an

The bergère, however, had essentially run

understatement: coarse flat strands of pink

out of steam despite these late survivals. In

straw are haphazardly woven round a

1931, towards the end of The Forsyte Saga,

concealed wire frame to form a rough base for

Lady Mont wears ‘a straw hat so broad that it

branches of lilac that together with swathes of

covered her to the very edges of her shoulders’.

chiffon form a nest for a white dove; they then

Her nephew, walking with his cousin Fleur,

145

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hats

86 Maud Sambourne’s

notes her head, ‘round and firm and well-

going-away hat, 1898.

carried under a small hat’42 – so much smarter.

Right

Wartime military styles, turbans and tiny ‘doll’

87 Heather Firbank’s

hats, Dior’s post-war ‘pagoda’ and

hat by Henry, 1909.

Schiaparelli’s surrealism did not encourage

Below

bergères. Mad Miss Hare, chatelaine of a

88 Stephen Jones,

decaying mansion in Patrick White’s novel of

R.H.S. Hat, 2005.

1950s Australia, Riders in the Chariot, wears an

Opposite

old hat ‘wicker rather than straw … which gave

146

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1/12/17 10:49 AM

bowlers and ‘bergÈres’

her at times the look of a sunflower; at others, just an old basket coming to pieces’.43 Aage Thaarup’s mid-1960s bergère looks tired too. It’s all there: fine straw plait, meadow flowers and wheat stalks, but foliage has become a cliché. He recalls ‘a big Italian straw with pale blue ribbon and pink cherry blossom, a hat to evoke other days’. In the 1960s when hats were being discarded as symbols of convention, ‘other days’ wouldn’t do. But shades of the bergère may surface at Ascot, garden parties and weddings; for a wedding in 1972, for example, my inner shepherdess moved me to attach some silk cornflowers and velvet poppies to a limp panama – in retrospect not a look that I recall with enthusiasm. Things do get better. If Thaarup was not at his best with bergères, his belief that hats must have a motif stands: ‘the hat with no distinct idea is a helpless hat’.44 In 2005 Stephen Jones created the R.H.S. hat [87]. The hat’s lacy straw oval floats over the head, tipping down roses, forget-me-nots and pansies from a cockade of wheat stalks. As lavish as any cartwheel of 1900, the hat’s motif is nonetheless distinct. The R.H.S. bergère is no ‘helpless’ nod to tradition but created by someone who has understood and interpreted history. Rose Bertin would have applauded, Vigée Lebrun would have painted it and Maud Messel and Heather Firbank would have fought over it. The bergère, one could say, is finally a source of greater creativity than the bowler.

147

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9780857851611_txt_app.indb 148

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6 entertaining hats

A

hat is the most dramatic element of dress, but no hat, not even Napoleon’s, has had the universal impact of Charlie Chaplin’s bowler on screen or been as sensational as the

cartwheel hat in The Merry Widow, a stage musical comedy. On stage or screen a hat marks identity and telegraphs meaning; it can be a disguise, a sensation, a threat or a joke – or just a hat. This chapter will look at headgear in show business, and although theatre and film are allied, there are, as Anne Hollander says, differences: ‘theater is ephemeral … each performance is a new version. … But a movie is an enduring work … [it] shares the perfect, unchanging action of still pictures.’1 Films are revisited and reinterpreted, but stage moments are fleeting, conveyed in anecdote, illustrations or surviving conventions.

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entertaining hats

Consider the trilby: an ordinary men’s hat of

feathers. Louis XIV, seventeenth century

88 King Louis XIV in

inferior felt, it owes its name to Trilby

Europe’s most powerful monarch, fused the

ballet dress, 1660,

O’Ferrall, the cigarette-smoking, cross-

elements of royal entries, tournaments and

dressing heroine of George du Maurier’s play of

triumphs into magnificent opera-ballet

1895, Trilby. There is no ‘trilby’ hat in the novel

spectacles at Versailles that, as James Laver

of that name, and photographs of the actress in

said, ‘served the double purpose of amusing

the role in the play show her in a soldier’s coat,

his courtiers and impressing the world with his

short skirt, without a hat – though she would

glory’. 2 His plumed hat [88], worn here for a

surely have worn one at some point. The play

ballet, was inspired by the costumes of

undoubtedly triggered a ‘trilby’ mania, helped

sixteenth century Italian ducal festivals;

by songs and picture-postcards, but the visual

similarly feathered headgear, drawn from

record of the hat that the actress wore, and that

religious drama, are found on the Magi in early

created such a sensation, is lost to us.

Italian art. 3

Something of the slightly subversive image of

France.

Why feathers? Perhaps because power,

the actress did, however, move into popular

glory or fear is the desired stage effect, height

culture. Trilby hats figure in cartoons of

becomes important. For an audience, distance

suffragettes at the turn of the century. And it

diminishes and without artificial lighting,

then became everyman’s everyday hat from the

visibility is a problem; extra height

1920s to the 1970s. Slanted over the eyes, hats

distinguishes leading from supporting roles,

are stage conventions for disguise: the trilby

kings from courtiers. Actors in ancient Greece

figured on the heads of dubious characters in

had no feathers but wore built-up boots and

film noir of the 1930s and forties, shading

over-sized masks, making for rather static

Orson Welles’ sinister face in The Third Man of

performances, one imagines. Feathers give

1949, for example. Frank Sinatra gave his trilby

height without weight and, responding to every

a defiant tilt, and surviving the sixties hat

movement of the body, lend emphasis and

catastrophe, it has returned recently to city

grace, investing the performer with an

streets, inspired perhaps by trilby-wearing

otherworldly magic, part of the theatrical

celebrities like Johnny Depp, recalling its

experience.

original subversiveness.

Opposite

The architect Inigo Jones, returning to England in 1600 from Italy, designed masques

T heatre and F eathers

for the Stuart court, influenced by what he had

If one were to single out one thing that makes a

seen. Feathered headdresses were the finishing

headdress theatrical, however, it would be

touch to lavish costumes, fantasy creations

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hats

was part of city as well as court life, he granted patents for two London theatres, and feathers returned to street and stage.

Early Public T heatre Visual evidence of public theatre activity before this date is scant and, although they are fascinating and useful, we cannot be sure that illustrations to published editions of plays reflect actual stage practice. A sketch of a 1595 performance of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus shows soldiers in plumed helmets; Tamora has a crown, her son a laurel wreath. It is striking that even in so rudimentary a record, headgear identifies character. One wonders if playwright Robert Greene’s dismissal of Shakespeare as an ‘upstart crow beautified with our feathers’ was purely metaphorical. It isn’t until a 1709 illustrated edition of Shakespeare’s plays that we get further clues as to how they were staged and what headgear was worn. An engraving of a production of The Empress of Morocco of 1673 shows stage and auditorium of one of the new indoor theatres [90]. The play is now forgotten, but the 89 Inigo Jones,

whose purpose was to look magical and

engraving indicates how plays might have been

Masque Headdress,

splendid [89]. The Civil War of the 1640s and

presented in the years after Shakespeare’s

ca.1610.

Above

the Puritan interregnum, however, put an end

death. The performers, somewhat shrunk to

90 The Empress of

to the monarchy and to court entertainments

underline the grandeur of the architecture, are

Morocco, The Duke’s

– theatres closed and hats shed plumes. Life

sufficiently detailed to show the similarity of

looked up again for actors and hatters when

their costumes to those of the masque. In this

Charles II returned in 1660. Having spent some

case the play’s exotic setting would have

of his exile at the French court, where theatre

required an extra quota of feathers that may

Theatre, c.1673. opposite

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entertaining hats

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hats

91 The Rival Richards,

account for particularly prominent

plumes dominating Edmund Kean’s furry hat.

ca. 1814.

headdresses.

And Laurence Olivier’s fur-trimmed hat in the

Below

1955 film of Richard III was shamelessly

9780857851611_txt_app.indb 154

H eadgear Conventions

borrowed from Henry Irving’s costume of 1877,

The relation of engraving to theatre practice in

whose hat brim had by then become a wicked

Nicholas Rowe’s illustrated 1709 edition of

beak. Again, Falstaff has a plumed Tudor

Shakespeare is unclear. That said, there seem to

bonnet in Francis Hayman’s engravings for a

be certain conventions. Richard III, for example,

1744 edition of Shakespeare [92], and this hat

has a fur robe and plumed beaver. This hat, or a

was later to became a key prop in Verdi’s opera

fur-trimmed crown, has a long life. In a satirical

Falstaff, worn first in 1893 but still around in

print of 1814, ‘The Rival Richards’ [91], two

2008 in a feathery scarlet version, worn by

actors battle over Shakespeare, Junius Booth’s

tenor Bryn Terfel.

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Fashion and Comedy The introduction of actresses onto the stage in 1660 made little difference at first to the costuming of female roles, as dresses had been and still were hand-me-downs from patrons. Persuading actresses to look unfashionable has always been difficult, particularly in relation to hair or headdress. In Rowe’s illustration to Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, Silvia has a high 1700 ‘fontange’ headdress; an elegant Princess, in Hayman’s engraving to Love’s Labour’s Lost, wears a tiny crown perched coquettishly to one side, like Peg Woffington’s bergère of 1730. While unverifiable as theatre records these images

92 Francis Hayman,

suggest that a sense of fashion was important

‘Falstaff’, Plays of Shakespeare, Hanmer

to comedy, a convention that has continued.

Edition, 1744.

William Congreve’s comedy of 1700, The

Above

93 Lady Wishfort in

Way of the World, contains one of the few

‘The Way of the

references in drama to headgear. The arrival

World’, ca 1770.

onstage of the heroine Millament is heralded by

Left

her admirer Mirabel, vividly invoking a towering ‘fontange’ in movement, lappets floating: ‘Here she comes, i’faith, full sail with her fan spread and streamers out!’4 Women’s headgear became a popular running gag. Millament is funny but attractive, her headdress ultra-fashionable but not absurd. Her aunt, Lady Wishfort, on the other hand, first in a long line of comic stage dowagers, wears a gargantuan cap in an engraving of 1776, which, frilled, ribboned and ruched to an inch of its life, parodies current fashion [93].

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hero of the tragedy Busiris combines all these in a turban surmounted by a crown, surmounted by several feet of feathers – the play was called ‘bombastic nonsense’ [94]. The hero is wearing the so-called Moorish dress, featured in plays set anywhere south of Gibraltar or east of Suez. Europe’s growing trade with the East had made exotic topics popular and turbans fashionable, but surviving images are hazy. Othello in early illustrations has a soldier’s feathered tricorne, suggesting that military themes were privileged over racial. It was at all events difficult to escape the feather/tragedy analogy. In a 1791 illustration [94] of Douglas, a play set in a

94: Busiris and

T ragic Plumes

Douglas, Bell’s British

According to Aileen Ribeiro, ‘in the hierarchy

Theatre, 1777 and 1792.

Above, left

and right

of theatrical genres, tragedy merited greater attention to detail (both in terms of historical accuracy and costly elaboration) than did comedy’, 5 though it is rare to come across any visual evidence of an eighteenth century play with more than a token sense of period or geography. There are touches – ‘Vandyke’ collars, for example, or oriental turbans – to suggest the past or a foreign location. Plumes marked heroes: exotic, royal or military. The

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entertaining hats

distant Scottish past, Douglas, in a gesture to historic national dress, sports tartan leggings and cloak, but his bonnet, swamped in feathers, marks him as a traditional tragic hero.6

T he K embles and Edmund K ean Tragic heroines required plumes too, and in the late eighteenth century feathered hats allowed actresses to reconcile current modes to stage conventions. In France, Marie Antoinette’s modiste, Rose Bertin, had just launched the lavish fashion hat that became de rigueur across Europe. In 1780s Britain it became the ‘Gainsborough’ hat, made famous by the painter’s portrait of the tragedienne, Sarah Siddons, in an immensely plumed black hat [95]; though dramatic, the hat was in fact also simply fashionable. Siddons had a face for hats, and knew it. The murder of Duncan in Macbeth hardly seems an occasion for millinery, but in a 1786 painting of Siddons as Lady Macbeth [96], her modish black hat provides an effective frame to an elaborate coiffure and tense pale face. Gainsborough’s up-to-the-minute image of Siddons of 1785 is a contrast – or answer – to

image that is plumed – one wonders which she

95 Thomas

Joshua Reynolds’s 1784 portrait of her as The

preferred.

Gainsborough, Mrs.

Tragic Muse. Reynolds’s image is, as Ribeiro

An interest in the historic and national past

says, baffling as to costume.7 Aiming at

characterized late eighteenth century culture.

gravitas, he swathed her otherwise fashionable

Joseph Strutt’s history of British dress of 1776,

shape in drapes and added a ‘classical’ diadem

for example, was one of many publications

to her coiffure. Ironically it is Gainsborough’s

feeding such interests. When Philip Kemble,

Siddons, 1785.

Above

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hats

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Siddon’s brother, took over Covent Garden in

96 Thomas Beach,

1806 he introduced the notion of historically

Mrs. Siddons in Macbeth, 1786.

‘correct’ costume – whatever, in the case of

opposite

Shakespeare’s plays, that might mean. A china

97 Figurine of Philip

figure of Kemble as Hamlet shows him in

Kemble as Hamlet,

roughly Tudor dress; his tall hat [97] (toppers

ca. 1800.

had just come in), with the Prince of Wales’

left

three feathers, gives an unexpected emphasis to Hamlet as royal heir. 8 A figurine may be no more reliable as evidence of an actor’s appearance than an engraving, but to be saleable the object had to be recognizable as Kemble and Hamlet, and this could well approximate his stage appearance. Edmund Kean erupted into the latter part of the Kembles’s stately reign. He was the

until realism took over. A George Cruikshank

supreme Romantic actor; seeing him, said

engraving [99] of 1821 of a Covent Garden

Coleridge, ‘was like reading Shakespeare by

carnival is an elegy to traditional headdress: a

flashes of lightning’. 9 Richard III was his

tiny Richard III in a plumed hat waves his

signature role but his most powerful

sword; a dowager cavorts in a towering

performance was as another manipulative

eighteenth century confection; a Puritan in a

villain, Sir Giles Overreach, in a seventeenth

steeple hat looks down gloomily on the fun; a

century play, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, at

turban broods in the middle-ground and a

which Byron was said to have fainted. Kean, in

soldier in wildly waving plumes dances in the

‘Tudor’ garb as Richard III in a print of circa

foreground. With Punch at the back, Harlequin

1820 [98], has added several feet of feathers to

in front, it is a sea of familiar stage hats. When

his crown; as Overreach he wears a plumed

any one of these appeared on stage the

cavalier. Both characters are given to bouts of

audience knew what to expect; by mid-century

insane rage and one can imagine feathers

this was less true – at least of the ‘legitimate’10

quivering with fury – as Byron faints.

stage. Behind the Scenes at Astleys [100], a painting of 1840 of one of the new

Ex it Symbolic H ats

amphitheatres, shows performers in a ‘green

Stage headgear had been essentially symbolic

room’ littered with feathery hats. Richard III, in

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hats

98 Edmund Kean as

his usual hat, has become a clown, as has a

theatrical villain invariably wore an “opera

Richard III, 1821.

Falstaff figure in a hugely feathered affair; a

hat”, when the hero could easily be recognized

below

soldier’s extravagant plume cuts across the

by the soft wideawake which invested his brow

background, another soldier has hung his

with the sanctity of a halo … the comic man

scarlet-plumed pillbox on the wall. Little is

was busy performing feats of balancing with a

known about this anonymous work, but it

straw hat at least two sizes too small for him.

suggests that dramatic headgear was

Today, however, a stage adventurer often

beginning to move out of ‘legitimate’ theatre

masks his villainy under a Panama while the

into the ‘illegitimate’, into burlesques and

hero … conceals his lofty forehead beneath the

extravaganzas – musical shows featuring

hideous contour of a billycock.’11 This is

spectacularly costumed dancing girls.

confusing, he says, and a pernicious influence

An advice book of 1912 mourns the passing of stage-hat conventions: ‘Time was when the

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on etiquette. The billycock/bowler was clearly not quite genteel.

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entertaining hats

Vaudeville and Burlesque An evening in London’s fashionable playhouses of 1900 might offer simply a play by

into music hall in London, into opéra-bouffe in

99 George

Paris and vaudeville in America.

Cruickshank, Tom

Vaudeville was the American equivalent of

Shakespeare, a society comedy or a ‘modern

the British music hall, consisting of a series of

melodrama’; audiences of 1840, however, would

separate acts: minstrels, acrobats, conjurers,

have expected a fuller programme with comic

comedians, male or female impersonators.

sketches, dances and extravaganza, as well as

American vaudeville modified burlesque’s

a play, all in one evening. The loss of the

ruder sides but kept the tradition of chorus

extraneous material, legacy of the old

girls, scantily costumed and generously hatted.

unlicenced theatres, sent audiences to other

In Britain, Gilbert and Sullivan’s late-century

kinds of entertainment. As the painting of

operettas are cleaned-up descendants of the

Astley’s suggests, feathers and symbolic hats,

burlesque, as are the Principal Boys of

along with a section of the audience, moved

pantomime, popular family entertainments.

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and Jerry at Covent Garden Carnival Ball, 1821.

Below

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hats

100 Anon Behind the

Cross-dressing was part of burlesque and

early nineteenth century Frenchman as well as

Scenes at Astley’s,

music hall tradition: Vesta Tilley, a male

to a mid-century Scot. At all events, in music

impersonator, in trilby or top hat and tails until

halls from late century onwards a flood of

her death in 1920, was so successful that she

objects magically emerged from top hats:

became a male fashion icon.

flowers, birds, eggs and a range of foodstuffs,

ca. 1840.

Below

some piping hot. This would not have been

9780857851611_txt_app.indb 162

Conjurers and Comics

quite so effective with a bowler. Toppers were

Stage-hats identify a role, suggest character or

for ‘toffs’ and at least part of the joke lay in the

period, but for conjurers, comedians and

contrast between the grandeur of the hat

jugglers hats are functional, part of an act,

(however battered) and the indignities inflicted

used to surprise or amuse. A top hat has long

on it by rabbits, eggs and pork pies. The bowler

been a magician’s main prop: the first

was used on stage to suggest the ‘boss’ class

rabbit-from-hat trick has been credited to an

but did not have aristocratic associations.

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entertaining hats

I touched on bowlers in silent film in the

Fields’s tipsy headgear, Linder’s topper defined

last chapter, but comedians like Chaplin began

him. Buster Keaton discovered the costume

their careers in the music hall, where hats had

element that gave him instant recognition, a

long been a performer’s stock-in-trade. An

flat ‘pork-pie’ hat that can still evoke his stony

eighteenth century French mime artist had an

face amid mounting insanity. Silent film

act where he pushed his head through a hole in

comedy gave hats starring roles; through the

a felt hat, twisting the brim into various styles

readily recognizable image of the hat emotions

and altering his facial expression to suit each

could be conveyed instantly and eloquently.

shape. Victorian comedians juggled with straw

Jacques Tati in the 1950s, recognizing this,

boaters. W. C. Fields, best known now in film,

deliberately returned to silent film. In his

was first a juggler; one of his tricks was to

too-short trousers and too-small hats he was

balance a top hat, cigar and broom on his foot,

the last disaster-prone, silent comedian, his

then kick them up so that the cigar went in his

hats perhaps the last of the tools of their trade.

mouth, the hat on his head and the broom in his pocket. The theatre critic of The Hatter’s

T he Bowler Again

Gazette in 1897 had observed that ‘the

Chaplin’s bowler is the most celebrated of

portrayer of swelldom treats his hat in a proper

these vital props and his account of how he

dignified manner. [His] smooth glossy tile is in

assembled his famous costume is interesting if

harmony with the character he is depicting.’12

disingenuous [102]. After a period in England

Fields’s hat, on the other hand, had once been

with comedy troupes, he was touring America

‘swell’, but battered, juggled, tipsily tilted, it

with Fred Karno’s company when he was

now typified the down-at-heel misanthropes he

offered a contract with the Keystone Kops. One

portrayed [101].

day, ‘on the way to the wardrobe, I thought I

Early European cinema and Hollywood took

would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane

comedy turns from the popular stage, both

and a derby hat. I wanted everything a

industries initially producing short films, then

contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight

series featuring favourite performers. There

and the hat small.… clothes and the make-up

seems nothing clown-like at first about French

made me feel the person he was.’13 In fact, the

Max Linder, immaculate on film in top hat and

comic potential of this outfit had already been

tails; comedy arose from the contrast between

spotted and over-sized pants with under-sized

his dapper surface and the messy events that

hats had long been the clown’s stock-in-trade:

assailed him, but which somehow left his

the Keystone Kops’ helmets were thimble-

gleaming topper still gleaming. Like W. C.

sized, and looked so absurd in fact that

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mentioned earlier – could be socially risky. Emerging from extreme poverty in London’s slums, the risks were real to Chaplin – a fall was a hair’s breadth away and to stay upright, to keep your hat on, required agility and politesse. Chaplin’s hat was iconic on both sides of the Atlantic. For the British the bowler and bow tie ‘indicated brave but ineffectual pretensions to the dignity of the petit bourgeois … at home on the streets of Victorian London … [it] did not seem out of place in the automated world of the 1930s’.15 In America it was Chaplin’s sentimental side that appealed, his weakness for pretty girls impeded but never defeated by an insecure hat. The Tramp, Winston Churchill said, is ‘characteristically American’ because he ‘refuses to acknowledge defeat’.16 His quest for gentility embodied by his (British) hat is overridden by his refusal of 101 W. C. Fields,

American police subsequently decided to

1940.

exchange their helmets for peaked caps.

above

In his tightly buttoned coat, respectable

drudgery and (American) love of the open road.

T he Catwalk Stage

collar and hat, Chaplin’s character blurs class

Anne Hollander has pointed out that by 1820

boundaries – he is like Lupin Pooter, not middle

the modern male image was in place, in a

class but somewhat familiar with the ways of

costume that indicated but did not constrain

that class, dwelling ‘in that pale indeterminate

the components of the masculine body,

region between the skilled artisan and the

suggesting ‘probity and restraint, prudence

prosperous businessman’.14 Big pants and

and detachment’ as well as ‘laboring and

shoes signalled lowly origins but white collar

revolutionary origins’,17 to which the bowler,

and bowler laid claim to better things. The

plain, practical and modern, could give a final

bowler represented gentility, but also when

touch. By contrast, nineteenth century

scruffy – as in the Sherlock Holmes story

women’s fashions ‘suggested quite different

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entertaining hats

ideas, none of them modern … deliberate

the highest aspirations of the general public’.19

102 Charlie Chaplin,

display sets the tone … elaborate headwear,

Women were now an important sector of the

ca. 1920, and

difficult footwear’.

18

The theatre’s search for respectability had

audience, at whom matinée performances were specifically aimed. The stage became a fashion

within a century arrived at the point where the

catwalk where women checked on styles worn

stage was a flattering mirror image of its

by their favourite actress before ordering new

middle- and upper-class audience. In

gowns and hats. The actress depended on the

fashionable New York and London of 1900 the

sale of images to create and maintain her

décor of stage drawing rooms replicated those

celebrity and ‘[her] celebrity in turn was used

at home. The actress, from being slightly

to market an array of goods’. 20 Photography

dubious, had become, according to Michelle

disseminated images widely and profitably,

Majer, ‘a personable, attractive individual

and recorded performances more reliably than

whose elegant wardrobe and lifestyle reflected

had engravings.

postcard, UK, ca. 1910.

above

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hats

Oscar Wilde’s comedy The Importance of

refined and sentimentalized his shows, keeping

Being Earnest of 1895, though essentially

the ‘Gaiety Girls’, though they were now made

parodic, was seriously dressed: ‘Dear me, you

over into properly elegant young persons.

are smart!’ Jack Worthing exclaims on

These images were designed to make a woman

Gwendolen’s entrance. Reviews of the play

feel that the actress was both like and unlike

carried images of the costumes and

herself. Beauty and celebrity set the actress

Gwendolen’s prettily plumed hat would grace a

apart but dressed in styles theoretically

fashion journal. Though Lady Bracknell is

available to all, she was someone with whom

descended from Congreve’s Lady Wishfort, her

you could identify, whose elegance you could

hat is fashionable, not funny: ‘On her

aspire to, had you the means.

exquisitely coiffed head [she] wears a bonnet consisting in front of two broadly spread and

T he M erry W idow

stiffened bows of black lace, radiating from a

Easy on the ear and eye and respectable, the

clump of pink roses, from which rises a tall and

fashion for musical comedy took off across

stiff feather.’21 Part of the comedy lies in the

America and Europe. Franz Léhar’s Merry

contrast between contemporary elegance and a

Widow of 1905, perhaps the most successful

lunatic plot.

musical comedy of all time, featured Hanna, 22 a ‘Merry Widow’ who, in an absurd plot, rises

Gaiety Girls

from nowhere to become a reigning duchess. 23

Musical comedy, a new form, crossed

In 1907 a Gaiety Girl, Lily Elsie, in a remarkable

boundaries between the legitimate and

hat, was a sensation in the role. The designer

illegitimate theatre. It took big production

was Lady Duff Gordon – or ‘Lucile’ – London’s

numbers from the extravaganza, parody from

most fashionable modiste. Drama

the burlesque, romance and respectability from

characterized both her design and marketing

operetta. George Edwardes, proprietor of

strategies: her models paraded down a ramp to

London’s Gaiety Theatre, first aimed to attract

music and lights. Lucile’s signature style, on

male playgoers. A programme cover of 1889 for

and off stage, was the S-bend sheath and

the burlesque Ruy Blas and the Blasé Roué

outsize hat, and after some ‘naughty’ gowns for

features a young woman with a good deal of

Wyndham’s Theatre, George Edwardes

leg, a plumed cavalier hat and little else. But by

engaged her to dress the Gaiety Girls.

the 1890s theatre-going had become the leisure

The summit of Lucile’s career was this

activity of polite society and, changing tack,

creation of a dramatic persona for the unknown

Edwardes set out to woo a new audience. He

Lily Elsie, on whom Edwardes had put his

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money as the ‘Merry Widow’. For an actress it

103 Lily Elsie, 1907.

was not enough to appear to be as elegant as

Left and above

the society women she impersonated, she must actually be dressed as expensively and by the same dressmakers. Elsie was rebuilt with a new coiffure and wardrobe; when she appeared in clinging white chiffon and an immense black hat loaded with pink roses and bird-of-paradise plumes, she stopped the show. Years later she puzzled over the hat: ‘it had a few black wisps of paradise on it; it wasn’t particularly large but it created a craze’24 [103]. For all her great beauty she disliked performing and eventually became reclusive, but however she remembered it, her hat was the toast of nations. Lucile was less shy: ‘it was a personal triumph … The Merry Widow Hat brought in a fashion which carried the name of “Lucile” its creator all over Europe and the States … we made thousands of pounds through the craze.’25 Lily Elsie, immortalizing and immortalized by a hat, may be the great exception to the rule that stage moments are fugitive. The craze crossed the Atlantic and in 1908, on the show’s opening on Broadway, a hat was promised to all coupon-bearing theatregoers. The result was chaos – women trampled each other down in the frenzy. ‘The house-manager announced that the hats were all gone … one hundred angry women left the theatre empty-handed with “only the débris and the memory of the struggle” to show for their

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hats

104 Irene Bordoni in

efforts.’ It was, as Marlis Schweitzer says, the

M usicals and Hollywood

the musical comedy,

kind of ‘bargain-counter crush’ one might

Around 1914, largely through pressure from

expect in a department store: the manager ‘had

conservationists, the craze for feathers ended,

aligned female theatrical spectatorship with

though show business had by no means done

fashion consumption’. Foreshadowing the later

with them. Lucile had crossed the Atlantic

impact of screen stars on fashion,

with The Merry Widow and, as she said,

manufacturers began to name fashion items

became the rage. She relocated to New York

after celebrities, hoping ‘star endorsement

and while dressing elite women, also designed

would equal big profits’. 26 Given the amount of

for the stage, notably the Ziegfield Follies.

women in plumed enormities they were right:

These lavish shows, inspired by the Parisian

reversing norms, life now parodied art.

Folies Bergères, involved much posing on

‘Paris’,1928.

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staircases in gargantuan headdresses; with no plot, there were no constraints, there was no normality against which to measure absurdity. It is difficult to imagine anyone moving at all with so much headgear and so few clothes. Marilyn Miller, a Follies star, fumed at ‘this piece of c--you call a costume … it weighs a ton’. Though it was the subject of several films and launched the careers of many Hollywood stars, the Follies itself was never filmed. Singing, dancing glamour girls in fantasy headgear, however, became a staple of early cinema, an alternative to knockabout farce. Hollywood between the wars lured showbusiness hopefuls, among whom, as it happens,

more prettily plumed Pocahontas. With

105 Aunt Diana in

was my husband’s Aunt Diana, one of ‘Mr.

‘talkies’, work dried up and Diana returned to

the chorus line, 1927.

Cochran’s Young Ladies’. With a rather homely

Britain, but she was still dancing – still plumed

Above

face, but great energy and workmanlike legs,

– into her sixties in English provincial cities.

Miss Diana Verne found work in chorus lines. The

Off stage, as street wear, she wore little trilby

high point of her career, to judge by the

hats with small feather trims until she died in

memorabilia she has left us, was in 1928 in Paris,

the 1970s.

‘a singing and dancing’ Hollywood movie, ostriches’ on account of her ‘inordinate desire’27

Movies and M arlene’s H ats

for feathers. In one of the stills from the movie,

As movies developed a more serious narrative

ostrich plumes not only tower above Miss

content, the importance of illustrative dress

Bordoni’s head but also constitute half her skirt

intensified and by the 1920s studios were

[104]. The headdresses of the chorines lining the

maintaining enormous costume departments,

obligatory staircase are no less stupendous; they

divided between character costume and

stood very still and sang. A less glamorous image

glamour wear. Without sound or colour,

taken in 1927 from the wings of a New York

overemphasis, designer Howard Greer said,

theatre shows Diana in a line of dancers in a tiny

was essential to plots. 28 Movie hats supported

fringed skirt and a headdress of what looks like

characterization or emphasized a star’s

chicken feathers [105], presumably backing a

particular attributes: Chaplin’s exaggeratedly

starring Irene Bordoni, billed as ‘death on

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her ‘most fabulous’ models: ‘she selected forty-eight hats. All of them she wanted but one she wanted to wear to lunch … we finished about six hats before she finally picked one … wickedly simple, simply wicked.’30 Dietrich said Desire was the only film of which she need not be ashamed, and as a French jewel thief who seduces Gary Cooper, she needed good millinery. Dietrich had ‘a quite uninhibited approach to hats’31 and Daché eventually made fifty for the film, fondly recalling ‘a big dramatic beret with a visor … [that] set a mode for the Paris milliners that year’. Her simplest hats had the greatest impact: in Witness for the Prosecution of 1957, she stands in court in a beret 106 Marlene Dietrich,

small bowler, for example, or Marlene Dietrich’s

ca. 1935.

ambiguously seductive top hat.

Above

Dietrich’s hats are worth a detour. ‘Those

enigmatically tipped over one eye.

Hollywood and H istory

cheekbones and wide eyebrows’, said Aage

In the first years of film, costume seemed to

Thaarup, were ‘a milliner’s delight.… How was

return to early theatre practices: actors, like

I to match her mysterious glamour’, he worried,

Chaplin, chose their own clothes; directors

‘a bedouin headdress … a hat with a pixie

cast around randomly or drew on wardrobe

crown [with] a miniature replica of Buddha’s

stock for something suitable. D. W. Griffith,

hands?’

29

Movie designers underlined her

auditioning for Birth of a Nation, said ‘I have

allure with clinging gowns and stylish hats

no part for you, Miss Hart, but I’ll give you five

[106], but also with toppers, trilbies, military

dollars if you will let Miss Pickford wear your

caps and berets; with sound, a husky voice

hat.’32 After comedy-shorts, history epics

deepened her mystery. The French designer

became Hollywood’s stock-in-trade, but for a

Lilly Daché made her hats and in 1936 was

1917 version of Cleopatra Lucile’s headdresses

working in New York for the film Desire when

were more Follies than ancient Egypt. As

Dietrich herself appeared. Daché brought out

dress historian Edward Maeder explains,

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entertaining hats

‘the quest for authenticity must be tempered

Gone With the Wind, sent his designer to the

107 Vivien Leigh,

by the expectations and acceptance of the

southern states to discuss dress with the

Gone With the Wind,

audience’, 33 and as movies initially drew from

author and research period costume and

popular entertainment rather than the

textiles. Glamour was the essence of

legitimate stage, spectacle trumped

Hollywood and few film costumes have been

authenticity. The coming of sound, however,

as glamorous as Vivien Leigh’s: romantically

had a significant impact on design: ‘With the

evocative of the Civil War period, their

human voice actresses suddenly became

silhouette was nonetheless contemporary. Her

human beings’, MGM designer Adrian recalled,

hats, by John Frederics, though correct, were

and ‘everything had to be more real’ or at

set at 1930’s angles, w rong for 1865. In the film’s

least appear real. He wanted to lure audiences

opening scenes Leigh’s picture hat, its bow to

out of their own time into another that

one side, is pure 1939, its angle underlining

paradoxically would convince by its familiarity.

Scarlett’s girlish coquetry, a contrast to her

David Selznick, director of the 1939 film

final, bare-headed, war-weary image [107].

34

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1939.

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hats

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entertaining hats

T he L ast Big H ats

Diana Cooper over the Ascot scene. Lady Diana

108 Audrey Hepburn,

Wartime saw tight budgets and more sober

described her mother’s straw hat, ‘trimmed …

My Fair Lady, 1964.

films. Costume departments were cut; half the

with little bits of bird’s breast and ribbon in

opposite

films made in the 1950s were Westerns, where

dirty pink’. 36 Beaton used ‘dirty pink’ for Julie

Stetsons and bonnets moved thriftily from film

Andrews’ Broadway Ascot outfit – not a good

to film. Once part of a system, design became a

choice, but worse in the sagging pink hat

freelance career. No one actually designed

whose construction was patently wrong. He

Disney’s Davy Crockett hat but, more fluffy toy

redesigned the scene for the movie, drawing on

than hat, it was popular in the mid ’50s,

the black Ascot of 1911. The scene with over four hundred black and

especially with children. The hats of Gone With the Wind had been

white costumes was, as Deborah Landis says,

shaped by fashion and shaped fashion in their

‘one of the biggest design challenges of the

turn. But if Scarlett’s hats were inspirational,

production’ and became a sensation. When

Audrey Hepburn’s Ascot hat, designed by Cecil

Hepburn’s Ascot costume was auctioned in

Beaton in 1964 for the movie My Fair Lady and

2011 ‘it fetched $ 3.7 million’. 37 The gigantic hat

bigger even than Lily Elsie’s ‘Merry Widow’,

enhanced Hepburn’s delicate face and huge

brought something to a close. Beaton had

eyes [108] – like Siddons, she had a face for

designed for movies post-war, notably Gigi in

hats. Beaton was steeped in the period, but in

1958. The heroine in Ronald Frame’s novel

keeping with the film’s approach he stylized

Penelope’s Hat, is trying on hats in a London

his designs; hats of 1911 were big but not quite

store around 1960: ‘An assistant explained,

that big. Lily Elsie’s ‘Merry Widow’ of 1907, in

“It’s the ‘Gigi’ look, madam.”’ Having just

keeping with current modes, was only slightly

taken a lover Penelope rejects the hat, feeling

tilted and anchored to the coiffure – it was

‘too old to pass herself off as an ingénue’.

wearable. Hepburn’s hat, fixed to an elaborate

35

Less spectacular than My Fair Lady, Gigi still

substructure, sat at a perilous diagonal, more

had its effect – but why did Beaton’s Ascot hat

Ziegfield Follies than real or even period

lead nowhere in fashion terms?

headgear. There was never a madder, lovelier

Beaton had in fact designed the Broadway stage version of My Fair Lady in 1956, and for the movie he made a radical change. Born in

hat than this, but as so often when something reaches its height, it was about to disappear. I must admit I longed for a Gigi hat in 1959.

the Edwardian era, Beaton counted among his

It was young and ‘French’, qualities that after

friends those who had been part of that world.

the conservative 1950s made it desirable, but

For the stage show he had consulted Lady

by 1964 I had no hats. No woman in 1964 saw a

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Subversive Berets Marlene Dietrich’s beret in Witness for the Prosecution, for all its plainness, is suffused with meaning: on glamorous Dietrich, it looked suspiciously ordinary. The beret is a ubiquitous object, its origins immemorial, often used to mark the stereotypical Frenchman, and it also became military and school uniform. But after an unexciting career it could, like the trilby, acquire subversive, political aspects. It was part of Chanel’s ‘poor’ look of the ’30s; the sexually ambivalent novelist Colette wore it flat on top of her curls. It is in fact how it is worn, not ‘designed’, that counts. The French star Michelle Morgan set it at an insolent angle in the 1944 film Passage to Marseilles, symbolic of her part in a daring wartime escapade. That insolence – subtext to Dietrich’s beret – could be said to reach a climax with Faye Dunaway in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. Breaking Hollywood taboos about sex and violence, this film was a rallying cry for a 109 Faye Dunaway,

possibility for ordinary social life in Beaton’s

countercultural younger generation – 1968 was

Bonnie and Clyde,

hat; not only was it unwearable, but hats were

just round the corner. In retrospect, Bonnie and

no longer objects of desire in the same way.

Clyde is as much about style as about sex or

They were not something to invest in for next

violence; it was the mix of these things that

season. The young did not linger over millinery

contributed to its popularity and shock effect.

counters as their mothers had done.

Seeing Theadora van Runkle’s costume designs,

Sensational hats are nowadays seen at Ascot,

director Arthur Penn hoped his film would be as

but they are ‘dressing-up’ and correspond to no

good. Dunaway’s costumes launched a trend,

generally available fashion. Beaton’s was a big,

berets went on sale in discount stores at $1.99,

beautiful Hollywood hat: it made its impact,

temporarily restoring, Edward Maeder says ‘a

but it was not saleable to a modern consumer.

hatted look to a hatless generation’. 38

1967.

Above

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entertaining hats

But women did not in fact suddenly want

legends: Astaire’s topper, Chaplin’s bowler,

decorative hats again – amorphous and plain,

Bogart’s trilby, Dietrich and Dunaway’s

a beret is anti-fashion. It was as a symbol of

berets. And nostalgic TV series like Mad Men

dissent that it sold: at $1.99 the beret was

or Foyle’s War can even hold out some hope of

headgear for comrades, as Che Guevara saw.

a revival for men’s hats.

In photographs the real Bonnie Parker is not

Hats in movies are associated with certain

especially pretty, but in strappy shoes,

individual stars. In the theatre, however,

midi-skirts and beret she has style. Her

there are no Garrick tricornes or Kemble

origins in America’s Depression years, her job

toppers; hats are seen in relation to roles –

as a waitress and above all the criminal

Falstaff’s feathery bonnet – or are

career that outraged norms and parodied the

conventions – heroes in plumed helmets,

American Dream, made her – in the attractive

‘Moors’ in turbans. Subject to changing

person of Faye Dunaway – a seductive icon of

fashion and less linked to status, women’s

‘radical chic’. Like Alex’s bowler in A

stage hats, unlike men’s, are rarely associated

Clockwork Orange, her insolent beret [109],

with roles or traditions, beyond crowns for

together with Warren Beatty’s trilby, served

queens and big hats for aunts: the Merry

to glamorize violence and rebellion. Often

Widow is perhaps the exception that proves

‘in’, never quite ‘out’, the beret remains a

the rule. Beaton’s Ascot hat, theatrical and

regular gesture to radical chic.

cinematic, had no fashionable afterlife,

Audiences still want to look like their favourite stars, but in the story of movie headgear, the hats of Dunaway and Hepburn

although it is still unforgettable as seen on Audrey Hepburn. A hat can make a performance: without

– one everything the other wasn’t – are

the beret’s insolence Dunaway is just a pretty

perhaps the last important hats. Deborah

girl. Designer Colleen Atwood describes

Landis, in her book Hollywood Costume,

Johnny Depp, in the 2010 film Alice in

points out that film costume ‘has an impact

Wonderland, searching for a hat ‘that had

when it is in sync with other trends in

gone through a holocausty moment in [the

fashion. But this seems to be happening less

Hatter’s] life… [He] found a piece of charred

frequently.’39 After 1965 hats fell out of use,

laser-cut leather embroidered in gold thread’

and few hats since on either stage or screen

and bought it. ‘It just took it to a different

have been influential. But movie hats do live

place’, he said. ‘The hat itself’, Atwood says,

in a culture’s memory. Worn for effect, they

‘was the key.’40 As any five-year-old knows,

can be easily recognizable tributes to

when you want to ‘dress up’, you need a hat.

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7 sporting hats

S

ports have had a lasting effect on the clothes we now wear. When travelling, shopping or pursuing activities that have nothing to do with sport it has become commonplace to

wear trainers, anoraks and, of course, baseball caps. There is nothing new about the transfer from sport to fashion, particularly in the case of men’s clothing: the cloth coat, buckskin breeches and round felt hat fashionable in 1800 were derived from British country and riding dress and form the basis of the modern suit. Women, on the other hand, came late to sport and, more subject to the precepts of decorum and fashion, were slow to adapt their dress to physical activity. Sports headgear has certainly moved to wider contexts – boaters are not always in boats and a baseball cap may have little to do with baseball.

9780857851611_txt_app.indb 177

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hats

110 Prince of Wales in

Sports that involve fast or sudden movement

cap that Trollope’s Miss Stanbury sniffed at in

a golf cap, ca. 1920.

require protective clothing; on the body’s most

1869 reached its social zenith in the 1920s on

Opposite

vulnerable area, the hat is especially subject to

the golf-playing Prince of Wales [110]. Men’s

damage and tumbles. A friend who hunts in

headgear, being plain, generally translates

France fretted over scuffs on her reinforced felt

smoothly into sportswear, but when women

tricorne from a recent brush with a tree, but

take up sports, often ‘borrowing’ men’s hat

might thank Coke of Holkham and Mr. Lock

styles, criticism and innuendo creeps in. Both

that it wasn’t worse. Protection is a basic

sexes – but especially women – are torn

consideration and sports hats, as McDowell

between practicality, decorum and fashion.

says, ‘are usually the ad hoc answer to a

Decorum requires a hat out of doors, while

specific problem … players will not abandon a

fashion decrees a big picture hat – can you play

game … simply because of a change in the

tennis in a big hat?

weather’,1 nor indeed because of physical

Hats have always embodied respect, but

danger. Risk is fundamental to sport. Cricket

like laurel wreaths they can celebrate

balls kill, as do bicycles, cars, horses and ski

achievement. In a tradition dating back to the

slopes. The right headgear affords vital though

nineteenth century the British reward success

not total protection: a golf cap can do little

in football or rugby with a ‘cap’, a custom now

against a golf ball, but would a golfer

extended to other sports. A ‘hat-trick’ in

substitute a helmet for his cap? Other things

cricket records the moment in 1858 when a

sometimes seem to matter more.

player, having taken three wickets in

As most sports originated in games played

succession, was given a hat. In November 2014

in breaks from work or in leisure hours,

the Australian cricket team placed their caps

participants would have worn ordinary dress in

over their bats as a mark of respect for a team

which hats were a mandatory component.

member killed by a head injury. Sport often

Men’s sporting hats therefore began as

involves group competition: headgear with

everyday or working headgear, sometimes

colours, badges or lettering marks affiliation to

becoming uniform, sometimes developing

club, team or sponsor. Headgear helps to

certain specific characteristics, like the

identify distant figures in motion – the bright

deerstalker’s earflaps. In sport, however, hats

caps of jockeys, for example – but display, even

can be multipurpose, multivalent and socially

seduction play a part. One of Anthony

mobile. From protecting gamekeepers at work,

Trollope’s husband-hunting ladies ‘knew she

bowlers became headgear for the hunting

looked more than ordinarily well in her tall

classes and then city wear; the plebeian cloth

straight hat and riding gear’. 2

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hats

H unting, R iding and A rchery Until the arrival of bicycles and the combustion engine in the nineteenth century, the horse was the quickest way of getting from A to B. Men on horseback wore all types of fashionable hats and from earliest times women appropriated these hats when out riding. John Evelyn in 1666 recorded the Queen ‘in her cavalier riding habit, hat and feather, going out to take the air’. 3 These flattering outfits figured frequently in portraits: Godfrey Kneller’s Lady Cavendish [111] of 1715, dashing in her habit and cravat, has placed a large black feathertrimmed tricorne purposefully on top of a periwig. Joseph Addison in The Spectator of 1712 dislikes ‘this immodest custom … Ladies who dress themselves in a Hat and Feather, a Riding-coat and Perriwig … in imitation of the smart Part of the opposite Sex.’4 Freed from bulky seventeenth century periwigs, the smaller tricornes of the eighteenth century were worn at all angles; Gainsborough’s Mr. Andrews of 1748, in hunting mode, has tipped his back over a small tie-wig. By mid-century all types of felt hats were worn for riding: round and cocked, plumed and braided, as well as jockey caps. Though usually worn by grooms and masters of the hounds, young aristocratic Nancy Fortescue [112] in Thomas Hudson’s portrait wears a black velvet jockey cap with her habit in 1745. Maybe it felt youthful? It was certainly

180

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sporting hats

111 Godfrey Kneller, Lady Cavendish, 1715.

Opposite

112 Thomas Hudson, Portrait of a Young Woman of the Fortescue Family of Devon, 1745.

Left

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113 Joshua Reynolds,

more sensible than the huge, ostrich-plumed,

coiffure, possibly tied at the back. In retrospect

Lady Worsley, 1779.

black velvet cavalier worn by Lady Worsley

Lady Worsley’s hat looks defiant; the defendant

Above

[113] with a military-style habit, in Reynold’s

in a notorious divorce case, she was said to

114 Riding Habit, La

portrait of 1779. It is tempting to dismiss Lady

have had twenty-seven lovers.

Belle Assemblée,

Worsley’s hat – surely impossible on horseback

1812.

Above, righ

Hats and hairstyles were smaller by the turn

– as worn for the portrait, but as Johan Zoffany

of the century: in 1812 the Ipswich Journal’s

in 1780 painted Mary Styleman in an almost

fashion page describes ‘a small riding hat of

identical hat and habit it would seem that in

black beaver with gold cordon and tassels; long

both cases fashion prevailed over sense.

5

These hats would have been pinned to the high

green ostrich feather in front’.6 A ladies’ magazine, La Belle Assemblée, in the same

182

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sporting hats

year, features a riding habit with such a hat

huntsmen, one hat, ‘stuck on one side

115 Mr. Sponge, John

[114]. Ladies are initially given little part in the

[displays] well-waxed ringlets’; the other is ‘a

Leech, Jorrocks Jaunts

horsey plots of Robert Surtees’ mid-century

woolly white hat’. 8 These hats are both toppers:

novels, full of details of riding dress. Jorrocks

impractical but de rigueur on horseback for

in his Jaunts and Jollities of 1838 has ‘a

most of the century. Both ‘Phiz’ and Surtees’

broad-brimmed, lowish-crowned hat … [with]

later illustrator John Leech depict toppers, and

a green hunting cord which tackled it to his

early in the century some would be ‘woolly’

yellow waistcoat’ – a device to stop it falling

beavers, not the shiny silks imported from

off. The conservative Jorrocks prefers old-style

France. Jorrocks, admiring a collection of

hats; for a carriage race he wears ‘a smart

hunting headgear, dismisses frenchified silk

second-hand cocked hat with a flowing red and

and inferior fur: ‘“None o’ your nasty

white feather’.

7

‘Phiz’, Surtees’ first illustrator, puts

Surtees, London,1838. Below

gossamers or dog hair ones. There’s a tile!” said he, balancing a nice new white one with

Jorrocks in round hats or jockey caps for

green rims on the tip of his finger.’9 White hats

hunting. Two ‘swells’ are among the novel’s

were ultra chic, though the mid-century advice

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1/12/17 10:50 AM

hats

116 ‘Model Fast Lady’,

indeed, a small black cord [115]. Comedy in this

H. G. Hine (artist),

kind of novel often arises from spectacular

Model Women and

collisions. Mr. Sponge, if a ‘quiet round’ sort, is

Children, Horace

here a man of action and fashion, as we see in

Mayhew, London, 1848.

his encounter with a member of the rival hunt:

Right

‘Great was the collision! His lordship flew one way, his horse another, his hat a third.’12 Leech shows his lordship in a baggy coat, on the ground with his horse and flat hat. Mr. Sponge, on the other hand, is still seated, and his topper, though airborne, is attached to his collar by – of course – a small black cord.13 Prejudice against horsewomen, voiced by Addison a century before, persisted. A caricature of ‘A Model Fast Lady’ in an advice book of 1848 shows her in svelte riding gear and perky top hat [116]. She hunts and waltzes very ‘fast’, smokes and bets on horses – but her chances in the marriage stakes, according to the advice book, are slim.14 However, by 1860 book Habits of Good Society considered them

in Plain or Ringlets? Surtees lets girls join the

‘fast’. Thackeray’s fickle hero Pendennis, for

fun. We meet ‘cantering bevies of beauties

example, wears one at Epsom.11

with party-coloured feathers in their jaunty

10

Mr. Sponge’s hat in Surtees’ Mr. Sponge’s

little hats’; Leech’s engraving features feathery

Sporting Tours ‘was not one of those paltry ovals

headgear on obviously ‘nice’ girls on

or Cheshire-cheeseflats or curly-sided things –

horseback. Rosa McDermott replaces the male

it was just a quiet round hat’, like Mr. Sponge.

as hero. Surtees’ heroes hunt, and Rosa hunts

Rival hunts are distinguished ‘by the flat hats

in ‘the prettiest of hats with a beautiful

and baggy garments of one, as by the dandified

well-tagged fox’s brush curling gracefully

air of the other’. As something of a dandy, Mr.

round the crown’.15 Even children hunt, and

Sponge’s ‘close-napped hat whose connexion

Leech puts them in tiny caps, toppers or

was secured by a small black silk cord’ is shown

pork-pies. Competent but never ‘fast’, Rosa

in Leech’s illustration as a tall topper with,

bags a duke.

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sporting hats

The author of Habits of Good Society

Gerard and her friend shows Teddie in

situates this change of attitude in a change of

breeches and the friend in a divided skirt, both

hats. The hat of masculine appearance ‘is

in big dramatic hats that seem to be worn more

almost always exchanged for a slouched hat,

for fashionable effect than for sport. American

sometimes round and turned up round the brim

horsewomen might prefer the ‘cowboy’ style,

… sometimes three-cornered … a long

but it was less protective than Lock’s bowler.

sweeping feather sets [it] off … the change in

Though bowlers are still worn on horseback,

riding hats has another good effect. The lady

notably for dressage events, the equestrian

equestrian cannot now be called masculine.’16

helmet has largely replaced it on the hunting

The persistence of feathers in huntswomen’s

field and for riding in general. In appearance it

hats – a fox’s brush may be even better –

is much like the classical, velvet-covered riding

reflects that element of ‘show’ that links sport

cap. These helmets have specific differences

to the theatrical – Surtees’ comic tumbles

from other sports helmets, fitting lower on the

always had appreciative audiences.

head, with the protection distributed evenly.

By 1900 the fashionable bowler hat had

Aerodynamics are less important here than for

come to be worn by women riders, with or

other sports – cycling, for example – and the

without a veil. Two postcards from Britain at

hat has therefore kept the classic cap style.

turn of the century suggest that on horseback

Velvet now covers a hard plastic shell and

bowlers and toppers moved interchangeably

straps across the inside create a space

between the sexes. In the earlier card a

between head and helmet, lessening any

huntsman waves a small silk topper at a flirty

impact from a fall. An odd little symbol

young thing in a high-crowned bowler; in the

persists: a well-made riding hat will have a

photographic card of a stagey woodland scene,

small bow on the interior headband at the

a top-hatted lady is ogled by a huntsman in a

back, originally, I imagine, for adjusting the fit.

modest bowler [117]. The taller the hat the

A black ribbon was for fox-hunting hats, red for

more power it carries: the dominant hat

stag hunts; hunt masters wore the ends

suggests that it is the women who will bag the

dangling below the helmet, while ‘common’

‘quarry’ – a mixture of old-fashioned sexual

riders kept the ends inside, and would not have

innuendo and a topical swipe at feminism.

dared let a ribbon show.

By the twentieth century women were

Teddie Gerard’s portrait signals a radical

riding astride and hats were bolder. A

change in attitudes to women and sport.

photograph of 1914 in London’s National

American women generally had greater

Portrait Gallery of American revue star Teddie

freedom of action at this period than European,

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hats

but there is still something startling about a

more likely to be included. Coco Chanel’s

mild young woman from Vermont of ca. 1900 in

introduction of men’s sportswear into women’s

a sensible cloth suit with matching forage cap,

fashions made trousers for women acceptable

fondling a large dead deer [117]. The women at

by the 1930s and obvious sportswear. By 1950,

English hunting parties of the time were more

having participated in two world wars, women

often decorative spectators in fashion hats

were competing with men in the workplace and

than participants.

in sport; their lives and consequently their

When sports were seen as largely social

clothes had changed. A wholesome American

activities and close to home, women were

blonde of the mid-1950s, with gun and dog,

expected to conform to society’s standards of

wears a shirt, trousers and a military-style cap

dress. But as sports became more popular from

– there is no subtext [117]. Cloth caps or felt

the 1880s, more institutionalized and more

hats are now usual for field sports; helmets or

adventurous, items of masculine clothing were

reinforced caps on horseback, top hats or

117 Hunting postcards, ca. 1900; 1955, U.S.A..

right

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bowlers for dressage events.17 My hunting

Bowmen’, male and female participants are all

118 Hunting ladies,

friend in France recently replaced her tricorne

in green. The men’s toppers sport vertical

UK, ca. 1890 and

with a helmet; she reports that at the next

feathers, the women wear plumed cavaliers in

meet, by silent agreement the rest of the hunt

contrast with the bonnets of spectators; bonnet

had followed suit. The problem now, she says,

brims would have interfered with the bow. The

is that men have difficulty in raising their hats

sport became increasingly popular with women

to ladies in conformity with etiquette.

during the century, described as ‘the only field

With no horses involved, archery may seem something of an anomaly here, but archery’s origins lay in hunting and for women at least it

c. 1910.

Above

diversion they can enjoy without incurring the censure of being thought masculine’.18 The life of Gwendolen Harleth in George

shares with riding the opportunity to display

Eliot’s novel of 1876, Daniel Deronda, ‘moves

elegant costumes and jaunty headgear. Set

strictly in the sphere of fashion’,19 and she

amongst grass, trees and sunshine, and

badly needs to find a rich husband. In an

essentially stationary, archery was a sport that

exquisite white dress with a green-feathered

set off the female form. For men archery had

hat she triumphs at an archery contest where

been a recreational sport from an early period,

she also dazzles her future husband. Eliot uses

but in 1781 a Toxophilite Society was formed in

dress to indicate Gwendolen’s enslavement to

London in which women were included. At

fashion, but the image also evokes Diana,

archery meets both sexes wore the fashions of

goddess of the hunt, who will kill the man who

the day of which hats were an essential

seeks her out. Eliot offers few details, but

element. Uniform outfits developed early and in

costume in this more or less static sport could

an engraving of 1823, ‘The Royal British

be as elaborate as the wearer pleased – only

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arm movements were required. The three

‘gentlemen’ amateurs in top hats, the

119 William Frith,

young women in William Frith’s painting The

professional (paid by local clubs) ‘players’ in

The Fair Toxophilites,

Fair Toxophilites [119] of 1872 are opulently

caps. In a drawing of the England Cricket

turned out in silk dresses and richly decorated

Eleven of 1847 when Joe Guy was captain

120 Lords and

hunting hats. Frith shows the hats at three

[121], a couple of men have caps, the umpire

Gentlemen of Surrey

angles, underlining their importance as fashion

has a felt, one player (perhaps the bowler

rather than sportswear.

this time) is hatless – but all the rest are now

1872.

opposite

and Kent Playing

in tall top hats. In the same year the Eton

Cricket, Hockey, Croquet, G olf and Baseball

and Harrow match opted for straw boaters;

The need for protective wear was tragically

bowlers, fashion vied with protection and

demonstrated by the death of the Prince of

protocol in mid-century cricket. One

Wales in 1751, struck by a cricket ball. Had

wonders which kind of hat was awarded for

Frederick I ascended the throne instead of

the 1858 ‘hat-trick’?

Cricket at Knole Park, 1775.

Below

by 1860 most schools preferred caps. What with caps, boaters, toppers and proto-

George III, who knows what course history might have taken? Before this event, in a painting of cricketers of 1744, 20 the players wear caps, popular among young ‘sparks’ who according to the Universal Spectator, ‘choose rather to appear as jockeys … black caps instead of hats’, 21 hardly protective though more secure than tricornes. The death of Frederick dealt a blow to cricket’s development, but in 1775 an unknown artist painted Lords and Gentlemen of Surrey and Kent Playing Cricket at Knole Park [120], suggesting that the game at least had recovered. The players are in everyday clothes and tricornes the batsmen are hatless. The traditional ‘gentlemen vs. players’ match at Lord’s Cricket Ground, inaugurated in 1806, used headgear to indicate social difference: the

189

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perched hats that must have been fiercely pinned to their coiffures to stay on at all. Like Lady Worsley’s hunting hat they beggar belief, but countless cartoons show just such hats – even sillier than the countess’s. Heeding W. G. Grace, the girls in ‘The Original English Ladies’ Cricket Match’, drawn in 1890 for The Illustrated London News, look quite serious in little peaked caps and boaters with ribbon trims matching their dresses [123]. But thirty years later there has been a seismic change: Bedford College’s cricket team, hatless and in knee-length tunics, is manifestly part of a modern post–World War I world. Hockey and its sedate but sometimes more malicious cousin, croquet, are more closely 121 Captain Joe Guy and the England Cricket Eleven, 1847. Above

122 W. G. Grace, ca. 1900.

Opposite, top

W. G. Grace, England’s most famous

associated with women than cricket. Adopted

‘gentleman’ cricketer, sensibly recommended

in Britain around 1880 by private schools as

cloth caps in 1888, and a red-striped one

suitable for girls, hockey’s origins go even

became his signature – a portly bearded

further back than cricket. Although played by

cricketer on a card of 1900 [122] surely refers to

men internationally, especially in its fierce form

him. Though helmets were obligatory for ice

on ice, in Britain it is still often associated with

123 ‘The Original

hockey and American football by the ’50s,

women. A sketch [124] of 1893 of a ladies’

Ladies’ Cricket

cricketers were still in caps or hatless until

hockey match tries hard with stylish wind-

around 1980; a player was booed when he wore

blown skirts to convey speed as well as

a helmet in 1978. After an Australian player’s

decorum, but boaters perched on every pretty

jaw was smashed by a ball, however, helmets

head undermine the image’s plausibility – only

Match’, Illustrated London News, 1890. Opposite, bottom

‘spread like mushrooms after rain’

22

and from

one is dislodged. Team photographs of the

2000 were worn by top-level players when

1920s and 1930s of robust bareheaded girls in

batting.

severe tunics shows realism had come to

Women joined the game at an early date: the Countess of Derby was painted cricketing with her friends in 1779, wearing big, perilously

prevail over femininity and fashion. Croquet, unlike hockey, is an almost stationary sport, the point being to knock a ball

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through a hoop while preventing your opponent from doing so. Originating in France, it arrived, via Ireland, in England in the 1860s, immediately becoming acceptable as a garden party game for both sexes. A blind eye, it was rumoured, was turned to young persons pursuing lost balls into bushes. Picturesquely set amongst lawns and trees and involving little exertion, croquet was the ideal venue for summer fashions. Artist Charles Dana Gibson’s ‘Gibson Girls’ – chic liberated young Americans – became

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124 Ladies’ hockey

fashion icons on both sides of the Atlantic.

England and a member of the Blackheath Golf

match, Illustrated

Gibson’s series of 1899, The Education of Mr. Pip,

Club was painted in 1790 in a uniform coat and

records a European tour, and in England the Pipp

a wide-brimmed round beaver hat that would

family attends a rather grand croquet party [125].

have been waterproof. From a classless sport

While Mr. Pipp plays, Mrs. Pipp holds his top hat

played on common ground the game became

– so wrong for the occasion, the season and the

an elite club activity, as is indicated by the

game. In the background the Misses Pipp, more

magnificent buff beaver top hat that sits on the

au fait with native customs, and in magnificent

head of John Taylor, captain of the Honourable

hats, are playing a game with two young men.

Edinburgh Golfers, in a portrait of 1818,

Croquet mallets confer respectability but in this

accompanied by his small caddy in a cloth cap.

game fashion is what counts.

John Whyte Melville’s portrait as captain in

London News, 1893. Below

As early as the fifteenth century golf was

9780857851611_txt_app.indb 192

1883, by Francis Grant [126], is obviously based

being played in Scotland and the Low Countries,

on that of Taylor, both featuring the captain’s

where weather made headgear necessary. By the

red cutaway coat, both accompanied by a

eighteenth century golf clubs had formed in

caddy in a cloth cap. But where Taylor’s hat is

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sporting hats

125 ‘A Critical Moment’, Charles Dana Gibson, The Education of Mr. Pip, 1899, New York: Dover Publications, 1969.

Left

126 Sir Francis Grant, John Whyte Melville, 1883, Edinburgh. Below

Surtees’ ‘woolly white’ variety, Melville wears a black beaver ‘round’ hat, quite like those of 1790, but with more of the fashionable bowler about it. In both cases it is the caddy’s cap that endures – neither topper nor bowler were practical and are here probably included for the status that they confer. After 1850 soft peaked caps, often in tweed, replaced toppers and deerstalkers. The Tailor and Cutter of 1898 reports that ‘the Golf cap is enormously popular. The crown continues to increase in size and is now made very full and overlaps the peak.’23 Worn in 1927 by the Prince of Wales, it became the rage on and off the links, and still prevails.

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Mary Queen of Scots was said to have been a

the country’s baseball teams for eighty-five

keen golfer, perhaps a patriotic myth, but early

years, sets out twenty-two steps for the

nineteenth century Scottish golf clubs included

construction of a good cap. For fans the cap

ladies. A lady golfer in a Punch cartoon of 1885

comes in all styles: more than two hundred for

wears a deerstalker, fashionable not only for

the Yankees, 175 for the Red Sox. The cap’s

sport and country wear, but, as worn by

main role now is team identification, but

Sherlock Holmes for travel and adventure, the

originally it was necessary protection for head

hat had something of the hunt about it. Played

and eyes against summer sun.

at a leisurely pace, golf was an opportunity for

The cap’s lettering or trimming identified a

the display of varieties of fashionable, if

city; worn by presidents and movie stars it was

sensible, outfits. A Gibson Girl golfer of 1900 in

a national symbol, and as an object of loyalty

a shirt, skirt and dashing boater has evidently

and superstition it became a myth. Babe Ruth

vanquished a sheepish youth in a limp cap.

adopted the current eight-piece version in the

Gibson’s ‘Girls’ are not caricatures; impeccably

1930s and his cap sold for $ 35,000 to a pitcher

costumed and hatted, they are more than a

in 1997. It didn’t conform to team standards, so

match for hapless males.

his manager made him take it off – and the

‘Angles are attitudes’, said Sinatra, and the

team lost. Some players will only wear one cap,

Gibson Girls’ hats are challengingly angled. The

however dirty; some are known for the

hat whose angle has become its raison d’être,

eccentric angle at which they wear their caps.

however, and that has nothing to do with

Unlike cricket, headgear was always

flirtation, is the baseball cap. The names of the

mandatory – at first, any headgear. A postcard

first baseball clubs – New York Knickerbockers

of a Massachusetts baseball club of 1909 [127]

and Boston Red Stockings – suggest that

features wide and narrow felts, old and new

clothing was important. The importance of

fedoras, straws, big soft cloth caps and smaller

knickerbockers, however, pale before the fact

peaked ones. The players in work clothes pose

that today New Era, the biggest sports hat

in a rough field, and the image, with its

company in the world, sells 20 million baseball

affectionate but ungrammatical message on

caps a year to nonathletes.

the reverse, forms a touching whole. Some

The New York Knickerbockers’ first hat in

thirty years later three upstanding young men

1849 was in fact a straw; a Brooklyn team

pose for a very different photograph [128] in

invented the modern round-topped baseball cap

uniform shirts, knickerbockers and visored

and by 1900 it had acquired a long visor and a

caps, each at a slightly different angle –

top button. New Era, having produced caps for

prophetic gestures of nonconformity.

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Why is the cap now often worn in reverse? Baseball was the national game, and the cap, as McDowell explains, was ‘the classless headgear of a nation dedicated to egalitarianism’; 24 cheap but emblematic, it was a perfect democratic unifying symbol, but by the 1950s it had dulled into respectability. In the early 1960s – that fatal date – it acquired political dimensions. Representing a challenge to WASP privilege and ‘preppiness’, it was worn by radicalized white college boys in revolt against older conservative values. Worn backwards, its rejection of conformity was accentuated, its protective function denied, its heroic symbolism mocked. Adopted as headwear by urban blacks and Hispanic

127 Three baseball players, ca. 1940, United States.

Above

128 Massachusetts baseball team, 1909, United States.

Left

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129 George du

immigrants, it was a badge of defiance, a

his cap backwards. When Andy Roddick wore

Maurier, ‘Tennis

symbol of alienation from a society they could

it the right way round in 2003 it was almost a

neither escape nor join. From there it became

challenge. Both male and female players now

the uniform headgear of the new music, rap

wear headbands and peaked caps or visors,

and hip-hop. Backwards is the new forwards,

though a woman has yet to wear a reversed cap

to the point where the back of the cap is the

at Wimbledon.

Match’, ca. 1880, London.

Below

standard front at Wimbledon. How next will mutinous youth look mutinous?

In its original medieval indoor form, ‘real tennis’ was popular with European monarchs and the cause of no less than three royal

T ennis

deaths. In the eighteenth century ‘real tennis’

In the early 1990s Jim Courier, aiming for the

headgear was the undignified nightcap, worn

‘college boy’ look, was the first tennis player to

without a wig for comfort, but in 1837 a sports

wear a baseball cap for championship matches;

writer felt that though caps were acceptable,

ten years later Australian Lleyton Hewitt wore

bare heads were better. 25 Lawn tennis,

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sporting hats

invented in the 1870s on an English croquet

become optional, but at its start lawn tennis as

130 Tennis foursome,

lawn, became a popular summer sport for both

an outdoor activity was subject to etiquette:

1930.

sexes. Though more energetic than croquet, it

ladies did not go out hatless. A George du

could be played quite sedately and at first was

Maurier cartoon from the 1880s shows a hatted

more of a social activity than a sport, and thus

young woman about to deliver a backhand

had a considerable fashion input.

smash [129]. Judging from photographs,

A court with spectators is a place of drama

however, reality was more staid than du

and display; major tennis events are and

Maurier suggests, with more big hats than

always have been the focus of media attention.

smashes. Pretty tennis girls in hats figured

For women players therefore, a striking

largely in popular imagery at the turn of the

appearance, if not as useful as a good serve,

century – like archery, tennis showed the

was important. I am old enough to remember

female form to advantage. A journal of 1890

Gussy Moran’s sensational knickers at

paints a less flattering image of tennis girls: in

Wimbledon in 1949. At that date headwear had

flounced skirts and ‘a blue flannel cricketing

9780857851611_txt_app.indb 197

Below

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cap pierced with black-headed pins’, she

By mutual agreement, Venus wears visors,

presents, it says, a ‘strangely incongruous

Serena headbands.

figure’. 26 But if you were serious about tennis, caps were better than boaters with their armory of pins. By the time two champions, French

Water, Ice and Snow Sports Several of the sports discussed above afforded

Suzanne Lenglen and American Helen Wills

opportunities for dalliance, but none more than

Moody, were playing in the 1920s the women’s

those involving water and boats. The straw

game was a serious affair and its headgear

boater, from being a replacement for a sailors’

practical. A photograph of mixed doubles

heavy leather headgear, became the nineteenth

players of 1930 shows women in bandeaux and

century’s favourite summer hat – it was light,

visors like those worn by Lenglen and Moody;

affordable and flattering. Men rowed, punted

men are bareheaded [130]. Post-war, hats were

and sailed in boaters; women were generally

on the wane and tanned complexions became

decorative passengers. Busy men in boaters fill

signs of wealth as well as health, evidence of

the foreground of a postcard of 1900 of Henley

beaches and ski slopes. In white designer

Regatta, an annual event on the River Thames,

outfits enhancing their tans, tousle-haired

not far from London [131]; in the background

tennis players became role models and media

ladies in picture hats recline in boats.

stars – headgear would have cramped their

Returning to Daisy Ashford’s story, The Young

style. But around 1990, responding to the now

Visiters of the same period, we find Bernard,

evident dangers of exposure to sun, Jim

Mr. Salteena’s rival, setting off with Ethel for a

Courier took to baseball caps and Monica

day on the river. He wears ‘rarther a sporting

Seles, visored headbands – caps and visors

cap … [with] quaint checks and little flaps to

again became the norm.

pull down’ – evidently the useful deerstalker.

If tennis dress grew sensible, it also became

Ethel, anticipating romance, ‘looked very

inventive, occasionally outrageous. The tennis

beautiful with some red roses in her hat’.

court was always a scene of fashion

Bernard duly proposes and they return with the

statements: there were Lenglen’s décolleté

‘mystearious water lapping against their frail

dresses in 1920 or Katherine Hepburn’s short

vessel’. 27

shorts in 1940. More recently the Williams

In Theodore Dreiser’s novel of 1925, An

sisters have given tennis styles another

American Tragedy, this sentimental cliché

dimension altogether, but if their dresses are

turns dark. Also anticipating romance, Roberta

startling, their headgear stays traditional.

puts on ‘a chic little grey silk hat with pink or

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hat for the journey back; trains require hats.

131 Henley Regatta,

lover, Clyde. Instead of romance she is pushed

But he is traced, tried and found guilty, unable

1900, United

into the lake and left to drown; Clyde throws a

explain the necessity of two hats for a day’s

new boater into the water after her with the

boating trip.

scarlet cherries’ for a day’s boating with her

lining removed so that its owner – presumed drowned – cannot be traced. He keep his old

Kingdom.

Below

‘Angling’ as a term is already suggestive, and the scene of a party of anglers painted by

199

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132 George Morland,

George Morland in 1788 [132], is comparable to

Bertin hat. A century later a cruder image on

A Party Angling,

Watteau’s amorous fêtes champêtres. As in

an American comic postcard also shows a lady

archery or croquet, the setting is picturesque

in pink and a smart hat ‘angling’ for a

133 ‘Pleasant

and activity minimal – dress is therefore

gentleman in a boater [133]. Ostensibly worn as

Reflections’, ca. 1890,

unconfined. The informality of the central

protection against the elements, the images

figure’s pink dress and big leghorn straw – a

insinuate that hats are ‘bait’ – like top hats on

version of her male companions’ round hats – is

horsewomen. Women’s hats were, after all,

a style invoking pastoral fantasies. The men’s

rarely seen as innocent, especially when

cloth suits and beaver hats show the English

women were ‘sporting’ with men.

1788.

Below

United States. Opposite

country look favoured by French

9780857851611_txt_app.indb 200

Henry Raeburn’s portrait of 1795, The

revolutionaries, and the lady in pink could be

Reverend Robert Walker Skating on

Marie Antoinette playing peasant in a Rose

Duddingston Loch, is a favourite Christmas

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sporting hats

card image. There is something unintentionally

could be a fashion plate. His high-crowned

comic about the Reverend Walker’s tense

bowler, so well brushed it glows, sets off an

pink-nosed profile under a black beaver hat,

impeccable ‘cutaway’ and shiny skates. She is

gliding across the ice. Adding to the effect, he

executing an elegant turn in a pretty veiled hat

has pulled the hat further down on his head

of the kind known at the period as ‘three-

than normal – hats were worn on top, not down

storeys-and-a-basement’ for its layers of

onto the head. It is a proper ecclesiastical hat,

ornament. Two male skaters, also in bowlers,

but something about its juxtaposition with

glance admiringly at the exemplary couple.

shiny little skates makes it not quite serious

There is, all the same, something faintly

– which may explain the card’s popularity as a

absurd about bowler hats on skates; they

festive greeting.

invoke comic tumbles. It may be our

A skating expedition was like a promenade

association of bowlers with clowns and

down Bond Street or Fifth Avenue for the

bankers, though it is not the hat we laugh at, as

opportunities it afforded to show off the latest

Bergson said, rather it is ‘the human caprice’

modes in public. A photograph of 1885 [134] of

with which it is associated. In general, as

a couple skating in New York’s Central Park

sports grew more serious, democratic and

201

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134 Skaters in Central

Thick woolen hats became the obvious headgear for fast-moving, cold-weather sports.

Park, 1885.

Skis had long been a means of transport in

135 Skier in a

northern countries but in the late nineteenth

‘jelly-bag’ cap, ca.

century, skiing, which had been a recreation,

1900, United States.

became a sport. An American girl of around

opposite

left

1900 [135] wears a knitted ‘jelly-bag’ teamed with a long skirt, not a costume for the steeper slopes. Ski wear is perhaps the first sportswear that as the sport developed became sexually neutral – a 1909 poster for an Italian ski club shows an androgynous skier in sweater, trousers and tam speeding downhill. A male ski champion in 1931, however, was photographed in a knitted bobble cap; warmth and practicality had sent it across the gender divide. The growing popularity of skiing coincided with the rise of aviation as a sport, and the aviator’s helmet – similar in shape to the cloche – gave a fashionable edge to women’s ski wear of the 1920s. Wool or fur hats, hoods and baseball caps were worn until the sixties, when affordable, practical sports headgear was

new synthetic materials introduced brighter

needed. Usually men set trends, but it was

colours into ski wear, and vivid knitted caps

women who first adopted the men’s tam

followed. With the introduction of new materials

o’shanter

28

for sports, a round beret-like cap

and shapes to the skis of the late twentieth

worn by Scotsmen, sometimes knitted, often

century, it became an increasingly fast Olympic

in tartan, decorated with a feather and/or

sport, each change making the ski faster and

pom-pom and with an external, flexible

more maneuverable – and more dangerous. By

headband that allows the crown to be pulled

2000 both male and female skiers were wearing

up, down or sideways. It stays put, can be

helmets, some with cameras attached to the

stuffed in pockets and, being Scottish, is ideal

front, and as their skills became identical so did

in bad weather.

their outfits.

203

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136 New Women on

C ycling and Motoring

called it the ‘freedom machine’. Freedom

bicycles.

Cycling and motoring at first seemed exciting,

however was not unconfined. Although the

risky novelties – sports rather than routine

New Women of 1890 bowling downhill in long

means of transport. Proto-bicycles had been

skirts and boaters make a spirited show [136],

around for a century – there is an engraving of

it looks horribly risky. Boaters on bicycles were

1812 of a dandy in a top hat on a velocipede

attractive symbols of freedom, but must have

– but it was not until the late nineteenth

required a battery of hatpins.

Below

century when road surfaces improved and

9780857851611_txt_app.indb 204

For bicycling ladies, the writer on health

pneumatic tyres were adopted that the bicycle

Ada Ballin advises ‘cloth costumes with small

took off. By the 1890s it was a popular

felt or cloth hats to match’. 29 A card of 1910

middle-class activity, especially with women

[137] suggests that the tam, its severity

– the American feminist Susan B. Anthony

alleviated by a feather, was a preferable if less

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lively alternative to a boater; the man complements his Norfolk suit with a cloth cap. ‘Cloth caps are being worn for almost any kind of sport’, The Tailor and Cutter notes, ‘Cycling, cricket, tennis, boating, golfing and what not. They are even adopted as the negligee headgear of everyday life.’30 H.G. Wells’s eponymous Mr. Polly of 1910, who finds freedom on a bicycle, rejects his wife’s offer of his usual brown felt for a cycling expedition: ‘He wanted his cap – the new golf cap.’31 Men continued to wear cloth caps for recreational cycling until after the Second World War, when baseball caps began to take over, but in town etiquette required the trilby or bowler; cloth caps in town were for errand boys. After tams, berets and wartime turbans, women jettisoned cycling headgear altogether, except, obviously, in bad weather. Carefree images of cycling girls, hair streaming in the wind, prevailed until headscarves became fashionable in the 1950s, when Audrey Hepburn on a bicycle with pretty headscarf and pretty little dog in the bicycle basket, made scarf, dog and bicycle all the rage. And then there were helmets. The question of making bicycle helmets

helmets were made obligatory in Australia and

137 Cycling Couple,

Canada in the 1970s, it was disastrous. Injury

comic postcard, 1910, UK.

Top

mandatory has been much disputed. In

rates did not improve and cycling was almost

traditional bicycling countries like Denmark

abandoned as a leisure activity to the

138 Great uncle Algy

helmet wearing is negligible – and so are

detriment of health and bicycle sales. At the

on his motorbike, ca.

injuries. But this is a small, flat country where

time, polystyrene helmets were heavy,

the bicycle has long been built into daily – even

unventilated and ugly. The carefree Hepburn

royal – life. Cyclists are respected. When

look became impossible and cycling

1904, United Kingdom.

Above

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unattractive. New construction techniques in

the combustion engine replaced the horse, it

the 1990s made for complex, lighter shapes,

was clear the engine ‘drew’ a carriage; the

with open vents for racing, where perspiration

bodies of early motorcars therefore evolved

was an issue, and as legislation in favour of

from the horse-drawn carriage. Coach and

helmets increased, helmets became more

carriage drivers had worn toppers and

acceptable, especially for children. In 2000 the

bowlers and for women carriage drives were

use of carbon fiber inserts and improved fitting

prime fashion opportunities, but in the open

systems made them more comfortable and less

air and on dusty roads headgear was difficult,

restrictive, but unfortunately not pretty.

even at an average speed of 24 mph. What

In a family photograph of 1904, great uncle Algy in a smart suit and bowler [138] is about

should driver and passenger wear? The choice for male drivers of motorcars,

to set off on his motorbike; he looks uneasy, as

to judge from a French postcard of 1909 [139],

well he might, since bowlers were hardly better

was between soft cloth caps and the peaked,

protection than caps. The need for protective

military-style hat worn by postmen, rail and

headgear for motorcyclists was less

bus employees. It became standard wear for

contentious than for bicycles, though riders in

chauffeurs, but owner/drivers – status-

1914 had resisted a newly invented helmet. T.

conscious perhaps – eventually preferred

E. Lawrence famously died as the result of

cloth caps. Noisy, vulgar Mr. Toad, in an

head injuries from a motorcycle accident, and

illustration to the children’s classic of 1908,

his neurosurgeon, aware of too many accidents

Wind in the Willows, wears a big checked one

involving military messengers, began the

for driving his expensive toy. In open cars

research that led to crash helmets and their

like Toad’s the stable cloth cap was practical,

increased, eventually mandatory, military and

but for women, hats were a serious problem.

civilian use. In the 1960s helmets had

The increase in the popularity of motoring

fiberglass exteriors and cork interiors; now

coincided with the increase in the size of

they are of impact-resistant plastic, carbon

women’s hats. For carriage drives, fashion

fibre or Kevlar. Early helmets had an open face

hats were required but they were costly,

and were designed to protect the skull; later

fragile and liable to fly off; veils and scarves

designs incorporated full-face protection with

were thus used to anchor the hat and protect

flip-up visors.

the complexion. Cars were beginning to be

When planes became a means of transport

enclosed by the 1920s, but the open car,

the airline industry had no precedent to turn to

considered younger and more sportif,

for the design of aircraft or uniform. But when

continued.

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sporting hats

139 Motorists, 1909, France.

Apart from some problems with tumbling

Men’s and women’s hats have separate

toppers, men’s sports hats have developed

stories and when they cross each other, as they

straightforwardly. For women things were less

do in sport, responses are ambivalent. Helmets,

simple: many sports until the twentieth century

on the other hand are uncontroversial, but dull.

were upper/upper-middle-class leisure activities

Half the fun after all in taking up a sport is the

and dress depended on where they took place

acquisition of a smart outfit; a feeling that one

– in a public space, an institution, or as a social

has purchased the skill as well is not

event in or near home. Etiquette, decorum and

uncommon. As the lady in a jingle of 1894

fashion had to be taken into account along with

puts it:

the demands of sport; when women adopted men’s items of dress, reactions were uneasy,

I’m au fait with the trim of a tailormade brim,

often disapproving and derisive. In sport today,

The crown and machine stitched strap;

health and safety takes precedence over fashion.

Though I’ve neither the motor, the sable-

Where there is risk, there are helmets, sexless and safe, though not failsafe.

left

lined coat, The goggles – I wear the cap.32

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8 fashion hats

I

n 1959 in a taxi on the way to an interview for an art college, I turned to my anxious mother and told her I would not wear the blue straw Breton she had bought me for the occasion. She

protested that interviews require hats. But something in the air said hats were ‘out’ – certainly for art colleges – and I refused. I was typical of the young women of the time who put an end to the evolution begun by Rose Bertin’s creation of the fashion hat for Marie Antoinette around 1780 by rejecting hats around 1960. What had happened during all those good years for hatmakers? How did the woman’s fashion hat develop? What shaped that development? Is the hat, once so indispensable, now finished or has something else evolved?

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hats

Fashion

prominent but also the most volatile item of

We often use the terms ‘dress’ and ‘fashion’ as

dress, it has often been stigmatized as the

though they were synonymous, but dress is

ultimate in feminine frivolity. But as part of our

material, fashion an idea that meets its time –

insatiable drive for novelty and the nuances

or, in the case of my 1959 hat, overstays it.

that confer difference and distinction, it plays a

‘Fashion’, Coco Chanel said, ‘is not something

valuable role. Fashion hats are a part of what

that exists in dress only. …Fashion is in the air

Giles Lipovetsky calls ‘the permanent theatre

… to do with ideas, the way we live.’ My Breton,

of ephemeral metamorphoses’. 2 While fashion rejects the immediate past

inspired by the 1958 film Gigi, was a gesture to the importance of the interview, and as it was

and presents itself as newborn, it is in fact

summer it could be said to be protective. But,

situated along an unbroken thread of evolution.

alas, hatlessness was about to become the

Discussing ‘Human Finery’, Quentin Bell

new fashion.

suggested that fashion, as a concept, was active in Europe by the thirteenth century, and

Whether or not a hat is in fashion is usually clear to the wearer. The ladies of rural

‘from then on the rate of change increases until

Oxfordshire in Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to

in our own times it has become prodigious’. 3

Candleford knew in 1889 that tall, narrow-

There are more specific claims for its birth

brimmed hats were ‘out’ and ‘wide-brims and

– fifteenth century Burgundy or nineteenth

squashed crowns’ were ‘in’. ‘The chimney pot

century Britain, for example. Fashionable hats

had had its day, the women declared, and they

had of course existed before Rose Bertin, but

would not be seen going to the privy in one.’

largely for men. Giovanni Arnolfini, in Van

Within a few years brims were so wide that

Eyck’s portrait of 1435, wears a black hat so unbecoming it could only have been chosen for

navigating a privy would have been tricky; as one of the ladies sighs, ‘headgear does date so’.

1

its modishness. Bell believes that two political

Changes in fashion reflect social and economic

events shaped fashion: the Puritan and French

change; solid citizens consequently spend time

Revolutions. I have chosen the years just prior

and money keeping up with fashion and yet

to 1789 as those in which the women’s fashion

solid citizens endlessly carp and criticize

hat sprang into being, apparently fully armed

fashion. Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue,

but in fact shaped by circumstances.

observed ‘there is something about fashion that can make people very nervous’: it feeds on wide

Shopping

publicity but sells itself as exclusive. The

What I am going to look at is how different

fashion hat is especially unnerving; as the most

shopping habits affected hat fashion, leading

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up to its heyday in the modern consumer world,

milliners’ shops associated with trade guilds

then its transmogrification into art, as the

within the city itself (‘millinery’ at this time

mass market fell away. A hat is a consumer

includes ribbons, lace, gloves and dresses as

item, bought to meet a felt need. The need for a

well as hats). Millinery was an important,

fashion hat gives it desirability. To be desirable

respectable source of employment for women

(and so profitable) it must be displayed, bought

and although frequently portrayed in literature

and worn; its existence supposes sellers,

as disreputable, a primrose path to

buyers and places in which to be seen. These

prostitution, in reality it provided possibilities

things change and hats change with them.

of starting a business (given a capital of

Until the eighteenth century it was largely men

£400– £500, the equivalent now of ca. £60,000);

who peopled public spaces and shopped for

an apprenticeship with a good milliner, though

consumer goods that might then be modified at

expensive (£50 or ca. £6,000), was a

home. In the city of London or the Palais Royale

worthwhile option for young women. Already

in Paris shops were small and probably

by 1803 London’s Oxford Street was said to

male-oriented. A seventeenth century English

have as many as 153 shops catering for the

country rector, Giles Moore, made several visits

‘whim-whams and fribble-frabble’ of fashion

a year to London to buy clothes for his family,

and regional towns like Bath 6 followed.

taking his wife only twice in twenty years. 4 By

Isabella Thorpe, in Jane Austen’s Northanger

the end of the eighteenth century, however, in

Abbey window shopping in Bath, enthuses over

France and Britain, social historian Maxine

a hat ‘with coquelicot ribbons’ she has seen ‘in

Berg describes ‘a rapidly expanding middling

a shop-window in Milsom Street’.7 Small

class, avid for fashion, modernity, individuality,

shopkeepers came to London to buy goods and

variety and choice, [who] sought out new

poach ideas, and pedlars took ‘hoods’ (basic

products … and took delight in consumer

hat forms) and trimmings into country areas.

experiences’. 5 The population of Britain, mainly

Window shopping and the purchase of

rural in 1750, was almost fifty per cent urban

fashion goods had now become a cultural

by 1830 and with improved transport and

activity in its own right for women, a part of

paved and lighted streets, women began to feel

daily life. Improved wages, product innovation

freer to walk about towns and cities.

and a teeming second-hand market made what

By the first half of the eighteenth century,

Maxine Berg terms ‘populuxe’ (inexpensive

according to social historian Amy Erikson,

versions of elite goods) available across

there were 336 women positively identified as

classes. Shopping took women out of the home

milliners working in London and forty-five

and into the street; shopping was ‘a place to

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140 ‘The Triumph of

go’, where observing and evaluating

d’Orléans built shops in the Palais Royale that

Liberty’ headdress,

appearances, they were themselves observed

sold (and still sell) fashion accessories.

and evaluated. The street became a stage, Berg

Revolutions happen when change is in the air

says, for buying and displaying novelties. What

and in entering commerce the egalitarian duke

women wore became significant, and

had taken a radical step. ‘Fashion and

headgear, the most immediately striking item

discordant opinion go hand in hand’, says

of dress, especially so. ‘A woman’s hat, to be

Lipovetsky, ‘a mark of social superiority,

successful,’ said hatter Fred Willis, ‘must be

fashion was nevertheless also a special agent

very noticeable indeed.’8

of the democratic revolution’. The race was not

1780, France. Opposite

to the richest or the grandest but to the most

T he Paris H at R evolution

innovative. And the fashion hat of the 1780s in

There were now individual hat shops as well as

in shops – was surely part of the ‘flashy

milliners selling trimmings, and systems of

display’ Lipovetsky identifies as ‘the movement

distribution for those out of reach of shops. The

toward the equalization of appearances’10 – the

economic and physical expansion of early

movement toward Revolution.

all its glory – born at court but soon available

eighteenth century London was dramatic, but

Paradoxically then, as elite women were

on the other side of the channel French culture

replacing corseted bodices and brocaded skirts

and fashions still dominated Europe: ‘no court

with softer styles and plainer stuffs, their

with any pretensions to culture’, says Aileen

headgear went mad. Sociologist Georg Simmel,

Ribeiro, ‘could afford to ignore the styles

making a distinction between ‘clothing’ and

9

emanating from Paris’. French fashions were

‘fashion’, believed clothing to be determined

court-inspired, while in Britain it was the

by externalities: plain dress would suggest

country gentry who set the tone; the court was

democratic tendencies. In fashion, however,

a fashion void. According to Ribeiro the British

‘not the slightest reason can be found for its

were uneasy about this French influence – they

creations … it delights in ignoring all forms of

disliked French politics and identified good

appropriateness’,11 and there was never a more

taste with sober bourgeois styles, but they

irrational object than that headdress of 1780,

nevertheless suspected that Paris held the key

‘The Triumph of Liberty’, in which a ship in full

to haute couture.

sail tops a towering coiffure [140]. It’s difficult

Eighteenth century Paris was developing

to believe that any head supported this

the boulevards and arcades that under Louis

structure, though there are enough engravings

XIV replaced medieval streets; the Duc

to suggest that similar conceits were indeed

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worn. Its title, if politically topical, seems

relationship with Marie Antoinette continued

141 Elisabeth Vigée

particularly absurd, as nothing could have been

until her death. Her extravaganzas gained her

LeBrun, Marie

less liberating – but on the other hand, as a

publicity, but more influential in the long-term

creative act, it was dramatic. Dramatic enough

was the simple bergère seen in Vigée Lebrun’s

for Maria Edgeworth to recall one in detail in her

later portrait of the queen and her own

novel Harrington of 1817 but set in 1780, when

self-portrait [84] of 1782. All the same, Marie

Edgeworth was in her teens: ‘at the top of the

Antoinette had notoriously overspent on hats

mount of hair and horsehair was laid a gauze

and the plain, ugly mobcap in Jacques-Louis

platform, stuck full of little red daisies, from the

David’s cruel caricature of her on the way to

centre of which platform rose a plume of feathers

execution mocks her excesses.

Antoinette, 1787. Opposite

a full yard high – or in lieu of platform, flowers and feathers, there was sometimes a fly-cap, or a

T he Paris H at

wing-cap, or a pouf.’12 Portraits of the time bear

With an influential, fashion-conscious court, a

witness to the way the simple domestic caps of

royal client and, crucially, an urban, middle-

the 1740s had by 1780 evolved into beribboned

class market, Bertin established the ‘Paris hat’,

balloons – or poufs – perched on hair-mountains.

a hat that though essentially a reworking of

Portraits of Marie Antoinette show that as

basic forms, could be reshaped, be of any

she left off stiff court dresses and in Bertin’s

material the designer decreed and be so

hands adopted her pastoral style, she did also

desirable that ‘everyone’ must have one,

begin to simplify her headgear. As hairstyles

though it might be replaced overnight by

grew lower and softer, headdress, as seen in

another, equally desirable. Bertin gave caps

Vigée Lebrun’s portrait of 1787 of the Queen

majestic volume, but it was her hats and

[141], followed suit. Sitting with her children, the

bonnets that had the greatest impact on the

queen is being domestic; her quasi-turban is an

‘theatre of ephemeral metamorphoses’. Named

indoor style, more cap than hat, but lent majesty

styles were credited to her and with an artist’s

by plumes. Much of Bertin’s success, as Ribeiro

status her influence was international.

says, ‘was in devising witty and topical items for her court clientele’.

13

When the king was

Even in war new styles travelled fast by way of fashion dolls and journals. Engravings in The

inoculated she created a ‘pouf à l’innoculation’ ;

Lady’s Monthly Museum between 1804 and

the queen’s headgear might be a ‘pouf’ to

1809 show smaller hats. They are given names,

maternity – an important element in the late

though why an innocuous straw of 1804 should

eighteenth century concept of ‘Sensibilité’.

be called a ‘Mistake’ hat or a lilac crêpe a

As Marchande de Modes de la Reine, Bertin’s

‘Conversation’ is unclear. This does however

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mean that a ‘Mistake’ spotted in 1806 will

chip headgear trimmed with flowers and

deserve its name. Derived from the seventeenth

grasses; the Monthly Museum features ‘a white

century ‘calash’ – a protective hood of silk over

chip hat, turned up in front ornamented with

cane or whalebone hoops – bonnets are usually

Roses’ in June 1804, and in December 1809 a

distinguished from hats by having two parts: a

straw bonnet ‘with a sprig of geranium’ [142].

soft crown and stiff brim. Brims expanded

Jane Austen’s novels contain few dress

forwards from the front edge of the calash,

references, but her letters are full of

concealing face and hair, and were tied under

entertaining comments. ‘Flowers are very

the chin with ribbons, bringing the bonnet

much worn’, she writes in 1799, ‘& Fruit still

round the face and drawing down the crown.

more the thing. … I have seen Grapes,

Bonnets were put in place from the back to

Cherries, Plumbs … likewise Almonds and

accommodate the hair in the back; hats were

raisins … at the Grocers, but I have never seen

put on top of the hair, kept in place by pins.

any of them in hats.’ In one shop she finds ‘only

Nostalgia for rural simplicity is evident in the increasing taste for round straw and willow

flowers … no fruit … I cannot help thinking that it is more natural to have flowers growing

142 Hats & Bonnets from ‘The Monthly Museum’, 1804, 1809, London.

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out of the head than fruit’. She stops short in

Milliners had become celebrities

mid-enthusiasm over a straw hat with purple

and, despite recent hostilities,

ribbons: ‘Heaven forbid that I should ever offer

had to be French. Mme.

such encouragements to Explanations’,

14

Herbault, for example, reigned in

recalling perhaps that in her novels millinery

London and Paris between 1818

excites only featherbrains. Lydia Bennet in

and 1840. Their creations could be

Pride and Prejudice of 1796 buys a new bonnet,

outrageous; even allowing for

but declares she will ‘pull it to pieces … and

hyperbole, the bonnet in a French

see if I can make it any better…. [With] some

fashion plate of 1830 [143], has

prettier-coloured satin to trim it with, I think it

reached some point of no return.

will be very tolerable’15 – a rather silly

Mrs. Nickleby, in Dickens’s novel

purchase given the family’s straitened means.

Nicholas Nickleby of 1838, recalls a milliner delivering an

Romantic E x travagance

elaborate bonnet ‘in her own

Fanny Burney’s heroine of 1814, Elinor,

carriage … strikingly

deplores fuss over trims: ‘scarcely any calamity

illustrative of the opulence of

under heaven’, she says, ‘could excite looks of

milliners’.18 Fashion-mad

deeper horror than any mistake in the

Cecilia in Maria Edgeworth’s

arrangement of a feather or flower.’16

1834 novel Helen declares, ‘The

According to French philosopher Roland

name is all! Does your bonnet come

Barthes, however, it is in detail that fashion’s

from the reigning fashionable authority? Then

143 French bonnet,

energy lies and points to the future. Maybe it

it is right and you are quite right…. Yesterday

ca. 1830.

was the end of war, Romantic exuberance or

when Lady Katrina asked little Miss Isdall

Regency excess, but from 1815 millinery detail

where she bought that pretty hat the poor girl

multiplied as fashion began to focus on the

was quite out of countenance. “Really, she did

upper part of the body. Hairstyles became

not know; she only knew it was very cheap”.

complicated, sleeves ballooned, lace collars

You saw nobody could endure the hat

expanded and on both sides of the Channel

afterwards … the purpose is not to look well

hats burgeoned. On a visit to Paris in 1816 even

but to have a distinguished air.’19

Mary Berry, a bluestocking on a modest

Above

Novelists often mock girls like Cecilia, even

income, succumbed to a hat ‘of white crêpe

while relishing descriptions of headgear. No

and satin, trimmed with artificial flowers’17

one has conveyed a fashion hat better than

costing two guineas (£136 today).

George Eliot in The Mill on the Floss. By the

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1830s – the period of the novel – headgear was

evidently knew you could lose your heart

144 Bonnet, in the

high-crowned, broad-brimmed and elaborately

to a hat.

illustration ‘Farewell (The Adieu)’ from

festooned. As there was no room for a cap

Heath’s Book of

underneath, a representative frill sat under the

M aiden Modesty

brim, adding to the confusion. Eliot’s heroine,

Dickens’s novels record the early Victorian

Maggie Tulliver, is gripped by the drama of

period and frequently use hats to make a point.

Aunt Pullet’s new bonnet and, in a parody of a

In Nicholas Nickleby, the Infant Phenomenon

Gothic novel plot, the bonnet, hidden in a dark

has ‘a pink gauze bonnet [and] green veil’ – an

room, is gradually unveiled. Mrs. Tulliver

especially lurid combination; Miss Snevellicci

gasps, ‘Well, sister, I’ll never speak against full

flirts with Nicholas ‘from the depths of her

crowns again!’ Mrs. Pullet puts the bonnet on

coal-scuttle bonnet’ – an extreme version of

and turns slowly round: ‘“I’ve sometimes

the poke bonnet. However, it is shrewish Fanny

thought there’s a loop too much o’ribbon on

Squeers who attracts the most attention in ‘a

this left side, sister”… She began slowly to

white muslin bonnet and imitative damask rose

adjust the trimmings … “I may never wear it

in full bloom on the inside … her bonnet cap

twice … who knows – a death in the family as

trimmed with little damask roses which might

there was after I had my green satin bonnet…

be supposed to be so many scions of the big

There’s never so much pleasure i’wearing a

one’. 21 It is Fanny’s personality that ruins the

bonnet the second year, especially when

bonnet. It doesn’t sound so unattractive, but

crowns are so chancy” … beginning to cry she

Dickens takes a moralistic view: the modish

said, “Sister, if you should never see that

headgear worn by flirts like Fanny are comic,

bonnet again till I’m dead and gone, you’ll

whereas the ‘old bonnet’ on Little Dorrit’s

remember I showed it to you this day!”’20

‘modest head’22 telegraphs virtue in the novel

Tearfully, Aunt Pullet frets that the display of her bonnet might be delayed by the

Beauty, ca. 1830– 1840.

opposite

of which she is the heroine. Though George Eliot recreated exuberant

requirements of mourning, tragically causing it

bonnets in her fiction, her own bonnets when

to date. Her bonnet is possibly the French

young in the late thirties would have been less

‘bibi’, all the rage mid-1830, whose crowns

fun. Victoria’s accession to the throne in 1837,

were indeed ‘chancy’. Big brims tipped

despite her own lively interest in dress, seems

upwards, but the crowns, loaded with

to have depressed women’s headgear; the

ornament, could be almost vertical, or they

men’s ‘stovepipe’ of the time was on the

might equally be long and horizontal [144]. The

contrary as tall as its name suggests. During

scene is comic but affectionate, as Eliot

the forties bonnets deflated: ‘The bonnet was

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the drooping ringlets, crept under the brim; a frill at the back added further modesty. In a time of political unrest – 1848 was the Year of Revolutions – the ‘bon ton’ perhaps decided to keep low profile. As Anne Hollander observes, ‘in literature devotedly modish women could never be shown to be devotedly virtuous, and truly virtuous women usually dressed unfashionably’. 24 Little Dorrit is ‘good’, ergo, her bonnet is unfashionable. Thackeray is subtler: in his 1848 novel Vanity Fair, we disapprove of Becky Sharp, who neglects her small son but ‘always had a new bonnet … flowers bloomed perpetually in it, or magnificent curling ostrich feathers’. 25 Then on a visit to pious Lady Jane she has ‘a neat black bonnet and cloak’, 26 a modest matron’s outfit. How is Lady Jane to suspect that treachery threatens?

H air and H eadgear Changing hairstyles, often the key to changes in headgear, became especially important mid-century. The poke bonnet of the 1840s had 145 Top hat and poke

the keynote of the age’, dress historian Willett

followed the lines of the ringlets, but as hair

bonnet, France,

Cunnington says, ‘a perfect symbol of

began to puff out over the ears, the brim

1838.

Above

meekness and modesty. The projecting wings

widened to an oval and the bonnet began to be

146 ‘The Fast-

shielded the blushing wearer from impertinent

worn further back, emphasizing coils of hair

Smoking Girl of the

glances, while a peep in that direction was

now worn at the nape of the neck. The brim

checked … a view of the straight but narrow

then became so deep that one wonders if the

Period’, 1869, London.

opposite

way was all that was permitted’

23

[145].

Ornament migrated downwards and following

face didn’t disappear altogether, but because the bonnet was pushed far back to

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– even so it must have looked excessively

Paris : V eils and T rimming

demure. Side hair then began to roll back from

The word ‘hat’ is often used generically to

a centre parting, pushing the brim of the

include bonnets. For the fashion correspondent

bonnet up and away from the forehead. The

of The Ladies’ Companion of 1851, however, all

resulting vertical ‘spoon’ shape created a gap

are ‘chapeaux’, though associated plates

between brim and head that filled up with

feature straw bonnets. These, she says, are

flowers and foliage; a frill at the back added

now correct for morning and afternoon, and

extra modesty. The bonnet’s oval, round a

coarse straw is as acceptable as fine Swiss or

accommodate the hair, this didn’t happen

face framed by vegetation, echoed the crinoline’s cage round the body: feminine, fecund and submissive. Bonnets were still correct for daywear, round straw hats for sea and countryside. But as chignons grew during the ’60s and crinolines began to spread backwards, bonnets rose and grew small and cap-like, finally becoming delicate circlets, known as ‘fanchon’ bonnets, perched on top of hair that, reinforced by artificial aids, was once more piled high. The bonnet ribbons, freed and floating, were called ‘follow-me-lads’ and the fashionable bustle underlined a new flirtatious air. To balance an expanding rear, headgear tipped forward onto the forehead. The look, known as the ‘Dolly Varden’ (see chapter five), was embodied in ‘The Girl of the Period’, a figure invented by the reactionary journalist Eliza Lynn Linton: in extravagant hats, false hair and a bulging bustle, The Girl was both caricature and fashion icon [146], delighting the popular press of 1869 and in retrospect, something of a feminist.

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147 Frank Wright

Tuscan. But Paris is still at millinery’s heart.

prices that alarm her, spends recklessly. ‘Tied

Bourdillon, The

When Anthony Trollope’s eponymous Dr.

round her head with a large bow and flying blue

Thorne of 1858 asks his niece Mary what she

ribbons under the chin, was a fragile flat capote

would do were she rich (only he knows she’s an

like a baby’s bonnet which allowed her hair to

heiress), she says she would ‘send to Paris for a

escape in the front and her great chignon

French bonnet … no English fingers could put

behind.’ A large spotted veil exposes her face

together such a bonnet as that’. When asked,

‘childlike between the baby’s bonnet and the

he guesses a bonnet would cost a pound: ‘Oh,

huge bow of ribbon’. Dizzy with ‘silks and

uncle’, Mary laughs, ‘it cost a hundred francs’

muslins, veils, plumes and flowers’ but knowing

– four English pounds (£350 now) – whereas

what such things entail, she pictures ‘a whole

her own home-trimmed one ‘cost five and

city full of girls stitching, stitching and

ninepence’ (£25 now). Dr. Thorne declares ‘you

stitching’. But when funds run low, ‘the

shall have a French bonnet’, but Mary protests

attractive streaming veil of the nice, modest

she was only joking: ‘you don’t suppose I want

courtesan’, Gerald’s new mistress, hardens

such things?’, restoring her credentials as a

Sophia’s heart. With her core of merchant

good girl. The bonnet is of course a test:

middle-class realism, she leaves him, and after

rejecting desirable but frivolous luxury, Mary

thirty successful years in Paris returns to

proves deserving of her inheritance – and an

England in a ‘rather striking hat’. 27

Jubilee Hat, 1888. opposite

upper-class husband. Rather less virtuously, Sophia Baines elopes

Bennett’s novel is in the social realist tradition and it is true that at the end of the

to Paris with Gerald Scales in Arnold Bennett’s

nineteenth century millinery provided a good

Old Wives Tales. The novel is set in the 1870s

source of female employment. John Dony says

but written in 1908, and Bennett is less

that by 1908, 11,000 women were employed in

moralistic than Trollope. While hats have

London’s hat trade. 28 Hats were made not only

played key roles in novels, here it is a new

for home consumption but were a major export

detail, the veil, that is a catalyst; depending

– remarkably sixty per cent of French straw hats

from the brim and concealing the eyes, the

came from England. Aage Thaarup in the 1920s

hat-veil, like the poke-bonnet, could both

remembers hat-boxes marked ‘Luton’ in the

invite and repel romantic interest. Gerald

stockroom of a Copenhagen store.

‘kissed her through her veil, which she then

But women could also trim their own

lifted with an impulsive movement’. In Paris,

headgear. Sophia Baines and Mary Thorne trim

on a wave of marital bliss, Gerald ‘thirsted to

their bonnets, and Queen Victoria urged her

see her in French clothes’ and ignoring the

ladies to update their millinery themselves [147].

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The least fashion-conscious woman of

from the constrictions of traditional feminine

Victoria’s time might expect to buy four hats a

modesty: ‘Young women regard the hat almost

season; a smart woman could have as many as

as a symbol of emancipation.’30 Hats were

fifteen – a considerable outlay if ready-made.

worn outside in the public spaces that were

Since trimming was important, towns outside

now so important for women: tea rooms,

Paris and London had mercers and

restaurants, hotels and the consumer paradises

haberdashers dealing in ribbons, veils, feathers

of the new department stores. Millicent

and flowers. Journals offered tips: ‘wild

Hemming in Henry James’s novel of 1886, The

flowers, weeds and grasses, drooping in

Princess Casamassima, makes her exuberant

panaches … mignonettes, roses de mai, in

way up the social and economic ladder from

bouquets on the exterior, a wreath of the same

slum child to department store sales girl, a rise

encircling the face in the interior’.

29

With so

symbolized by her hat, ‘a wonderful

much vegetation one imagines that results

composition of flowers and ribbons’. 31 Aside

were not always happy. Caroline Helstone’s

from military usage, men’s hats by the early

remark in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley of 1849 that

nineteenth century had lost their ornamental

‘Cook trims her own hat’ doesn’t sound

function and were determined by social

enthusiastic.

convention or the need for protection, but the pointless decoration on women’s fashion hats

H ats and F eathers

of the 1890s was dizzying: whole birds, insects

Caps and bonnets had become too domestic,

and small animals now joined grass, moss,

too much associated with maternal and

lace and ribbons [149], forming miniature

housewifely roles. During the second half of the

habitat groups. 32

nineteenth century hats would displace

Twenty to thirty million dead birds were

bonnets as fashion wear; round straw hats, the

imported annually to supply the demands of

accessory to Amelia Bloomer’s ‘bloomers’,

this ‘murderous millinery’. 33 Children’s hats

became marks of ‘forwardness’ – especially

were not spared: Maisie, a small girl at the

when worn over loose hair. In fashion what has

centre of a squalid divorce case in James’s

at first been seen as risqué and discordant

What Maisie Knew of 1897, is always on the

often becomes the mode; by the 1880s bonnets

move, putting hats on and off. Preparing to go

were being relegated to the elderly and

out with her governess, she is met by her

conservative. And in what was undoubtedly

glamorous stepmother with boxes from Paris.

one of its finest moments, ornament piled up on

After slighting the governess’s hat she turns to

the fashionable hat [148], marking its release

Maisie: ‘“I’ve got a beauty for you, my dear …

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A love of a hat … I remembered that ” – she nodded at the object on her stepdaughter’s head – “and I’ve bought one with a peacock’s breast. It’s the most gorgeous blue!”’ Maisie backs away: ‘it was too strange, this talking … about peacocks’. 34 A child would have been unaware of conservationist debates, but here James conveys both Maisie’s unease with the hat as well as her sense she is being bribed, and the reader registers the hat’s vulgarity on a child. Laura’s mother in Lark Rise to Candleford, is outraged by the hats of two little

sisters: ‘“There’s pomp for you! Feathers if you

148 ‘3-Storeys-and-a-

please!”…. shocked by the contrast between

Basement’ hat, ca. 1886.

their richness and Laura’s plain little white chip hat with its pink ribbon.’

35

Above

149 Madame Heitz Boyet, bonnet, ca.

The aesthetic lady of the 1880s had

1880, France.

preferred the ‘Gainsborough’ to the fussy

Left

‘three-storeys-and-a-basement’ hat; inspired by eighteenth century portraiture, this big plumed hat anticipated the gigantic millinery of the next decade. Despite conservation movements, the belle époque hat, several feet in diameter, carried unprecedented volumes of

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fashion that produced more plumes is a chicken and egg (or ostrich and hat) question. Fashion commentators of the period ruled that ‘to be fashionable this winter you will be plumed’ and in 1912, for example, just before the feather trade crashed, plumes valued at £2.6 million (today, multiply by one hundred) left South Africa. Historian Sarah Stein describes how ‘from the 1880s to the outbreak of the First World War ostrich plumes were a ubiquitous feature of trans-Atlantic fashion’36 and a key source of work for Jewish migrant workers in New York and London.

W idening Choices The ‘Merry Widow’ hat of 1907, described in chapter six, celebrated the ultra-feminine, a woman so fragile and encumbered by millinery that movement was impossible. Waving plumes and a complex substructure gave the illusion that the hat floated over her head; in fact, hats had never been less securely anchored. So much volume was unmanageable and women often secured these hats with chiffon scarves. Their impracticality could be seen as a reaction to the 150 ‘The Latest

plumage. During the 1890s ostrich feathers

changes that had taken place by the end of the

Fashion’, ca. 1890,

farmed in South Africa replaced the costly

decade. Women were entering the workplace

osprey – unlike ospreys, ostriches were

and increasingly participating in men’s

plucked, not killed. Sumptuously beautiful,

activities; facilitated by machine production,

impossible to replicate, these feathers

cheaper dress styles responded to new freedoms

decorated heads that wished to be noticed

and to the demands of working women. The

[150]. Whether it was the increased production

tailor-made costume had become practical for

of plumes that produced the fashion, or the

work and sports, and on ‘advanced’ young

United Kingdom. Above

151 A ‘Doll’ Hat, 1900, USA.

Opposite

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152 Suffragette

The foundation of many of these styles was

postcard, 1890s,

straw, though decoration smothered shapes.

United Kingdom.

The simple boater was also a best-seller. Cheap

Right

straw plait from the Far East together with

153 Boater

Luton’s new machine production meant it could

advertisement, ‘The

be unisex, democratic and fashionable [153].

Gentlewoman’, 1908.

Beyond the statutory ribbon, little trimming

Below

was used. As Fiona Clark says, ‘it was the 154 Queen Mary’s

sporting hat par excellence, being worn for

toque, Vu á la Mode, 1933.

tennis, cycling, boating and spectator

opposite

sports’. 37 Not all agreed: Gwen Raverat, notable hater of hats, says her mother ‘never wore those dreadful hard boater hats … she was in her glory with a feather boa [and] ostrich plume hat’. Contrarily, Raverat howled at the sight of a great aunt in ‘a bonnet with purple ostrich feathers’. 38 With Princess

women like the American Gibson Girls, also unarguably smart. Young women’s headgear, reflecting both stylistic and social change, took on a plainer air. Such developments, however, were mocked and attacked, not only by men but by women themselves – feathery, flowery, costly hats, whether three feet in diameter or tiny ‘doll’ hats perched on a mass of hair [151], were reassuringly feminine. Interestingly, leading suffragettes counterattacked with gorgeous hats that refuted cartoon images of harridans in bowlers, boaters or trilbies [152].

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Lucile, R ebou x and the Cloche Lucile’s celebrated ‘Merry Widow’ hat was the culmination of a style she had been evolving for some years and it was this outrageous cartwheel that dominated fashions in 1900. She had made her name with designs for the theatre and aimed for dramatic effects in dress collections to which hats were the keynote. Like Rose Bertin she gave her outfits titles – ‘Farewell Summer’ and ‘An Episode’, for example – suggestive names that might be connected to the fact that she was sister to the romantic novelist Elinor Glyn. The French milliner Caroline Reboux, Lucile’s rival, arrived in Paris like a Balzac hero from the provinces, penniless and ambitious. Her talent attracted society to her shop in Avenue Matignon and in an inspired moment in 1865 she attached little veils to her hat brims – another blow to the bonnet. Discovered by 155 Caroline Reboux,

Alexandra as role model, however, boaters and

Princess Metternich and patronized by

‘picture’ hat, ca.

bowler-style hats were not only country and

Empress Eugénie, she reigned as ‘Queen of the

1900-1920.

Above

sportswear but acceptable streetwear.

Milliners’ in Rue de la Paix from the mid-1860s

156 Copenhagen

Alexandra also liked toques, small, brimless

until her death in 1927. Designing hats for

tram, 1907.

hats, modestly decorated that had been around

Charles Worth and Madeleine Vionnet, her

since the seventies, as the safe choice for all

creations were considered haute couture. A

157 Little girls in

but the dressiest occasions. These hats neatly

Reboux hat of 1900 [155], if similar to Lucile’s

hats, 1911.

topped tightly curled coiffures, a style adopted

cartwheel, was a restrained affair. In a

by her daughter-in-law, Queen Mary, and which

postcard [156] of 1907 featuring Copenhagen’s

became her hallmark [154] and that of

new tramway, women are still in big hats, but

grandmothers everywhere until after the

only one topper features among the homburgs,

Second World War.

boaters and bowlers; public transport and

opposite,

top

opposite,

bottom

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automobiles were making cartwheels and toppers less and less feasible as city wear. ‘Fashion is in the air’, Chanel had said. And it was Reboux who created the cloche in 1908, perhaps in response to such developments – but what else did she sense, when, folding a piece of felt around a head, she created this helmet-like headgear? Millinery had reached gargantuan dimensions around 1912 but by 1914 this seemed inappropriate; simple shapes in bold, even harsh colour contrasts suited the wartime mood. As the bergère is to Marie Antoinette, so the cloche is to the 1920s flapper, embodying youth, liberty and a fresh simplicity. In the 1920s section of The Forsyte Saga, Soames’s daughter, Fleur, is discussing hats with her mother, Annette: ‘The most distinguished cocotte in Paris was said to be in favour of larger hats, but forces were moving against her’; motors and milliners are ‘toute pour la cloche’. 39 As often happens, children’s styles anticipate adult fashions: the little girls in a postcard of 1911 [157] are in hats worn by adults ten years on. Anna de la Trave, in François Mauriac’s Therèse Desqueroux of

a Reboux model.’40 Mauriac knew such detail

1927, wears ‘a felt hat without ribbon or

mattered. Styles of the twenties had broken with

cockade’. But, her mother says, ‘it costs more

the past – Anna’s hat marks a cultural shift.

than the hats we used to have with all those feathers and aigrettes. It’s the loveliest felt …

D. H. Lawrence was criticized for an over-concern with dress in his novel of 1925,

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Women in Love. His depiction of the educated,

heroine of the 1924 sensation novel, The Green

158 Adler adveristment,

independent sisters Ursula and Gudrun

Hat, in her open car.

‘Cloche and Car’, 1925. Opposite

Brangwen marks a radical change in attitudes

sisters walk through the town, Gudrun’s ‘large

L illy Dach é and N ew York

grass green velour hat’ is so startling that

It is important to note that in the public world

people jeer. The headgear worn by aristocratic

of consumerism now open to women, elegance

Hermione, by contrast, harks back to the fin de

might derive from hats bought not from

siècle cartwheel: ‘an enormous flat hat of pale

individual milliners but from ranges available

yellow velvet, on which were streaks of ostrich

in the burgeoning department stores. Elite

feathers, natural and grey’. This hat is probably

fashion disguised the mass aspects of

custom-made, but by 1920 it was no longer

production and lent exclusivity to its more

necessary to find an individual working

costly products; with clever ambivalence the

milliner; high-end stores were either importing

high-end store offered ‘exclusive creations’ by

hats from Paris or advertising their own hats as

a star designer. This shift from independent

milliner-designed. Heather Firbank was buying

production to the arena of the glamour-filled

designer hats [86] from Woollands in London at

store is nowhere better exemplified than in the

this period, a store that might well have

career of Lilly Daché. Caroline Reboux not only

provided Gudrun’s green hat and Ursula’s pink

launched the cloche, but before her death in

that is reflected in their appearance. When the

41

one ‘entirely without trimming’

– as

avant-garde as anything worn by Firbank. Hair was again a determinant. The post-war

1927, trained Daché, America’s favourite milliner. Daché left France for New York in 1924 and if Paris was ever seriously challenged as

bob and shingle haircuts along with short

the home of the fashion hat it was by New York

skirts were as much a sign of revolution as the

between 1920 and 1960. New York’s migrant

outré hair and headgear of the 1780s. Molded to

workers had sweated over Merry Widow hats;

the shape of the head and tapered at the neck,

its new dominance depended on another wave

the hair gave form to the hat [158]. As many

of refugees in the years before the Second

photographs show, for anyone less than

World War. Lacking English language skills,

sylph-like and of a certain age, it was an

they had to find manual work, and many

unforgiving look. Less dramatic but worn more

intelligent women went into the millinery

often than the cloche, therefore, and lasting

trade. Like Reboux, the penniless Daché,

into the 1940s, was the ‘pirate’ or ‘slouch’ hat

according to her 1946 autobiography, soon

worn by celebrities like Greta Garbo, and the

prospered. Macy’s took her on, impressed by

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159 John Lavery, The

her interview hat, but seeking autonomy she

The turban is a case in point. It was the

Artist’s Studio, 1910.

left, bought a failing hat business and turned it

signature hat of the 1940s, but in fact had been

Opposite

around. Her strategy was to offer custom-made

in and out of fashion for centuries. In the

hats along with a good deal of ‘that Paris stuff’,

seventeenth century when the Ottoman Empire

as her partner said.

opened up to the West, portraits of fashionable

America’s love affair with France, starting

ladies often featured Turkish costume, part of

in the 1920s, informed a whole cultural scene

an eighteenth century mode for portraits in

– art, literature and film. Daché’s

fancy dress. In Europe masquerade balls

autobiography is peppered with the names of

became fashionable and, as in portraiture, the

movie stars: Randolph Hearst bought hats for

Turkish Beauty joined the Shepherdess as a

Marion Davies from her, and you had to be

favourite costume. Roxana, courtesan and

careful what you sold to Joan Crawford – ‘I

eponymous heroine of Daniel Defoe’s novel of

knew that each hat would be the pattern for a

1724, at a masquerade party, wears a turban

million copies.’ Of one fading star, still buying

that has ‘a Pinnacle … with a piece of loose

hats in 1946, Daché says she had seen her

Sarcenet hanging from it; and on the Front, just

through ‘the flapper cloche, the Empress

over the forehead, was a good Jewel’.43 In later

Eugénie rage, through calots [Juliet caps],

eighteenth century portraits the turban’s

wimples, snoods and sailors’ – twenty years of

status seems to veer between domesticity and

fashion hats. Like Reboux she made hats ‘on

formality; it conveys a certain languorous ease,

the head’:

42

cloches for Jean Harlow, slouch

hats for Gertrude Lawrence and half-hats for

but when jewelled and feathered it has éclat. Jane Austen was lent a ‘Mamalouc’ cap in

Betty Grable. A tricky moment came in 1939

1799 – ‘all the fashion now’,44 she wrote in a

when Gypsy Rose Lee placed her hats on

letter. The Ladies Monthly Museum shows

strategic body parts for a striptease act until

turbans with formal dresses, trimmed with

Daché begged her not to. Not all publicity

feathers or flowers [146]. The exuberant 1830s

is good.

favoured turbans for evening parties, blown up and striped like small air balloons. Turbans,

T he T urban: Dach é and M adame Paulette

however, sorted ill with voluminous Victorian

Fashions that come from outside Europe, and

returning with the slimline styles of Paul Poiret

that represent a kind of exotic dressing up, may

in the early twentieth century. John Lavery’s

become nativized and normal, forgotten, and

portrait [159] of 1910 of his wife and daughters

then revived with exciting new connotations.

with their servant Ayisha shows an exotic Lady

skirts and coiffures; they disappear, only

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and Gloria Swanson were photographed in it and cabaret artist Carmen Miranda topped hers with bowls of fruit. Asked to contribute to a time capsule to be buried at New York’s World Fair in 1939, Daché made a turban ‘of draped silk jersey … emerald green and royal purple, trimmed in purple ostrich tips and held on by two jeweled fobs’45 – still there, I assume, a tribute to the importance of hats and to a fashion that encapsulated a period. Daché might claim to have established the turban in 1938 as glamour wear in America, but Madame Paulette would say it was she who invented the turban in answer to wartime restrictions in Paris. When the Occupation imposed limits on fabric the turban could be made (even homemade) from small amounts of any material, and decoration was optional but easily improvised. In 1941, finding herself 160 Lilly Daché

Lavery in a paisley patterned coat and plumed

unprepared for dining out, Paulette created a

turban, 1941.

turban in this radical style. Both Poiret’s

turban ‘by wrapping a black jersey scarf around

designs and Lavery’s image revive the

her head and fixing it in place with gold pins’.

seductive connotations of that earlier

Compliments from fellow diners suggested

fascination with the Orient, to which the décor

there was a demand to be met. Bicycles were

of the Ballets Russes – the cultural sensation of

the only means of transport in Paris and for

1909 – added new excitement.

this the turban was ideal: protective, stable,

Above

The Poiret look was difficult to achieve, but Daché’s turban [160] became the ‘must-have’ of the late 1930s, ousting the cloche. Its flexibility

easily pocketed and – crucially – new, chic and cheap. Paulette’s and Daché’s turbans evolved

suited the period’s faster lifestyle, but

differently. Hollywood glamour can be

decorated and in rich stuffs it was also

double-edged: on vamps like Lana Turner the

glamorous evening wear. Daché said 1938 was

turban acquired a dubious air. But in Paris,

‘the turban year’. Movie stars like Hedy Lamarr

whose social round continued despite the war,

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the turban stayed smart. Paulette launched a

godsend when access to hairdressers and

161 Turbans, Paris,

turban collection: ‘very modern as the high

shampoo was limited – glamour was not its

1944.

drape pulled the turban back off the face and

strong point, but ‘it kept them sane when the

the back section was extremely high’. The

world seemed to be losing its head’.47 Mrs.

turban bicyclette [161] caught on, not only on

Mop, a character in the wartime radio comedy

bicycles but for dinner at Maxim’s. Elegant

series ITMA, was always pictured in a turban,

women arrived through wind and rain, ‘then

bucket and mop in hand; post-war, associated

slipped on a fabulous turban, produced from

with comic tea-ladies, it lost status. There were

the bicycle’s pannier, and made a triumphant

revivals: Elizabeth Taylor wore turbans into the

entrance’.

46

In wartime Britain, however, its chic was

1970s; Princess Margaret wore an exquisite one by Carl Toms to a costume ball; Queen

shorter-lived. It became work and safety wear

Farah of Iran’s turban was patriotic. But these

for Land Girls and factory workers, and was a

were designer items on elite women; for the

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trend-conscious young, hair had become too important to be bundled into headgear with otherwise dowdy associations. A coda to the turban story is its long residence on the head of Simone de Beauvoir, from wartime to her death in 1986. Existentialist-feminist writer and companion of Jean-Paul Sartre, she wore an austere version, signalling perhaps her political sympathies and her self-created image as the no-nonsense woman of her time; on the other hand, turbans did rather suit her handsome features.

Chanel Where does Coco Chanel, the century’s most influential designer, figure in the story of hats? Chanel had in fact started as a milliner in 1910, buying in basic straw boaters and trimming them, simply but with genius: ‘Nothing makes a woman look older’, she said, ‘than obvious expensiveness, ornateness, complication.’ A liaison with the Duke of Westminster introduced her to British country life, strengthening her preference for natural fabrics and men’s simplicities – in a photograph with the Duke in the ’30s she looks dashing in riding gear and a bowler. Ahead of their time, her hats, like her clothes, created a sensation. ‘True culture’, she said, ‘consists in chucking a number of things overboard’: 48 feathers, flowers and birds from tricky hats, for example. A Chanel hat has staying power, it is not

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ephemerally modish any more than a Chanel

You popped all the back of your hair into

162 Elsa Schiaparelli,

jacket – both still look good today and embody

them.… It was a mark of defiance then for

‘Shoe’ hat, Paris,

lines that are frequently revived in mass

young women to have shoulder length hair as it

markets as well as in haute couture. Working in

meant you weren’t in the forces.’51 These

Rue Cambon for sixty years, she wore boaters

inventive hats, like defiant cheers, raised

and Bretons to the end.

morale in a bleak landscape; as Aage Thaarup

1938.

Opposite

said, they ‘crystallized the feeling for

T he I nventive 194 0s

something exaggeratedly frivolous’. 52 Anything

A turban might be a tight bandage or a

could be a hat – Schiaparelli once used a

generous cushion, exotically ornamented or

coconut; anything could be decoration – she

sternly unadorned, an inventiveness that

once used gloves. Success lay in the panache

inspired Elsa Schiaparelli’s approach to hats.

with which you carried it off.

Her 1938 surrealist ‘Shoe’ hat [162] broke

On the other side of the Atlantic a

conventions: while neither pretty, elegant, nor

beneficiary of America’s francophilia was the

strictly speaking a hat at all, it fulfilled the

Russian émigré milliner Tatiana du Plessix,

requirement that the successful hat be ‘very

taken up on her arrival in New York in 1940 by

noticeable indeed’. A mini-pillbox ‘worked to

Bendel’s, a store famous for hats. Her contract

49

represent the bonnet of a Daimler’

described

stipulated that her ‘nom de chapeau’ would be

by Anne de Courcy just before the war – and

Countess du Plessix and she was urged not to

surely inspired by Schiaparelli – must have

learn English. As her reputation grew she was

been quite noticeable too.

poached by the classier Saks – ‘Hats’, her

Clothes rationing during and after wartime

daughter and biographer says, ‘were big

limited scope, and for most women a good hat

business in those years’ – and America’s

was hard to find. ‘Had a terrible job getting a

wealth was scarcely touched by the war. A

hat’, a young woman wrote to a friend in 1944.

Vogue editor estimated that ‘during the 1940s

‘In the end found one in Jaeger’s … but am

she and her colleagues acquired a minimum of

sure I will absent-mindedly beat up a pudding

ten new hats a season’. So, as her daughter

in it, it’s just that shape. Think I must get a

said, ‘a polished talent like Tatiana’s was in

feather for the front.’50 Theodora Fitzgibbon

great demand’. 53 Playful European styles

remembers snoods as ‘a wonderful invention

without European austerity were behind

for wartime … when there was no time to go to

Tatiana’s creations, carried out with an

the hairdressers … they were made of a coarse

elegance that suited the ultra-feminine tastes

fishnet, like a bag, and threaded with elastic.

of the 1940s and fifties. A typical touch was the

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163 Dior, Pagoda hat,

thermometer that garnished a winter hat in

longings for individuality’. In Paris the blackout

Paris, 1947.

place of the usual feather. ‘Outrageousness had

had killed tea-dance hats, and though Thaarup

entered twentieth century millinery’, McDowell

understood how Parisiennes needed their

says. ‘In the hands of Mr. John, Lilly Daché and

defiant turbans, he found them frankly hideous:

Thaarup the outré hat was a marvelously witty

‘no British woman would wear hats as

Opposite

addition to the vocabulary of millinery.’

54

exaggerated – no American anything as heavy’. So he created the cocktail hat [164]: ‘in velvet,

Towards Crisis

trimmed with swags of tulle … on top a huge

Danish milliner Aage Thaarup confessed in his

sentimental rose … [it was] the “dressed-up”

memoirs that he had made some hats ‘quite

look that every woman out of uniform longed

simply for sensation value’. In his hands you

for’.

were usually safe; in Schiaparelli’s surrealist

Everything in post-war Paris, Thaarup said,

hats you could look sensational and au fait with

was scarce and expensive. ‘A top milliner’s

current cultural trends, but only if the

hat’ – including his own – ‘cost ten guineas’. 56

ensemble was right – part must harmonize

If only subconsciously, he was becoming aware

with whole, a costly undertaking. McDowell

that demand for exclusive millinery was

describes Christian Dior improvising a hat on

shrinking. In London he became milliner to

one of his models. He added a flower, then two

Queen Elizabeth (later Queen Mother), where

jet hatpins, but this was not sensational

he was able to indulge his (and her) penchant

enough: ‘Add a mass of veiling … double the

for plumes that at the end of the forties again

veiling!’ he demanded, explaining, ‘it is not so

became important. On the queen they looked

much a question of the hat itself, but the

sweetly old-fashioned, but in Elizabeth

proportions of the whole outfit.’55

Jenkins’ novel of 1954, The Tortoise and the

Dior’s Pagoda hat [163] crowned his 1947

Hare, Blanche Silcox’s stiff felts with ‘large-

New Look: full skirt, sloping shoulders and

domed crowns mounted with quills [are]

cinched waist banished the boxy post-war

absolutely formidable’. Jenkins’s narrator

silhouette. It was deemed shockingly

considers the preoccupation of women with

profligate, but he had sensed a mood. Wartime

hats was a preoccupation with men. Blanche is

rigor had created a hunger for luxury – big hats,

less seductive, however, than a young girl in a

silly hats, miles of fabric. Rationing lasted into

tiny black cocktail cap ‘studded with brilliants

the 1950s, but hats were coupon-free, evidence

… like a princess in a Persian miniature’.

that fashion could survive amid uniformity.

Blanche’s forties hat [165] is deposed by a flirty

They were, Thaarup said, outlets ‘for pent-up

bit of nonsense. The narrator finally feels sorry

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hats

for her in ‘a hard unbecoming felt. No one would have looked twice at it.’

57

‘The feminine, unquestioning Eisenhower

sacked in 1965. The machine can do wonderful things, said Thaarup, ‘but what could it do most easily? The USA manufacturer naturally

fifties’, Tatiana’s daughter says, were ‘the last

looked to this. The poor Paris designer was

golden years of the standards of beauty and

forced to follow suit … one no longer designed

elegance that had shaped my mother’s

for the individual face’, one designed for a

vocation’. Ironically it was Tatiana’s success

machine. Trimmings were badly done – ‘a

that finished her: in 1955 Saks asked her to

peaked cap studded with diamonds – it nearly

make a ready-to-wear line. New styles were

killed me!’ But Thaarup also notes that he

advertised as ‘available in all out-of-town

made huge amounts of hats in the fifties;

stores’. 58 Her couture line shrank and she was

perhaps over-production made hats tedious –

164 Lilly Daché, cocktail hat, ca. 1938, United States. right

165 Hat advertisement, London, ca. 1940. opposite

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fashion hats

too many hats worn under suffrance in a post-war world that had had enough of uniformity led to hat fatigue. Tatiana de Plessix’s daughter sees the sudden obsolescence of the hat in 1965 as ‘a singular chapter in the annals of Western fashion’. 59 There were socioeconomic factors at work: the democratization of socialist, post-war Britain and of America during and after the Kennedy years meant that the class distinctions that hats had marked were blurred, and mass production made them increasingly irrelevant, as exclusivity was expensive and no longer so smart. The young – especially the female young, now educated and in work – acquired spending power, which they did not use on hats; hair had become more important. In the 1950s Thaarup had already noted that hair was being ‘sheared and gnawed … hats were shrinking’; Vidal Sassoon’s recreation of the classic ‘bob cut’ was lethal. His angular styles relied on short, straight, shiny hair and unlike the stiff permanent waves of the fifties, it was low-maintenance, needing neither rollers nor lacquer. A Vidal Sassoon haircut was a recognized status symbol – why hide it? Thaarup, having gone bankrupt in 1955, reinvented himself, astutely buying new

T he T ransitional Scarf

premises in Chelsea – the centre of ‘Swinging

Like the earlier turban, the headscarf met the

London’ – and collaborated with Sassoon to

question of how to respectably cover your

create hats for the new hair. He says at the end

head, be fashionable and youthfully ‘sportif ’,

of his 1956 autobiography, however, that he is

as well as being in tune with the democratic,

‘tired’, and he shut shop in 1965.

post-war mood. In the 1950s Audrey Hepburn,

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hats

on and off her bicycle, lent scarves glamour;

increasingly vocal in Europe and America from

young Queen Elizabeth on horseback, wearing

the mid-sixties onwards, saw fashion as a

Hermès scarves from Paris, gave them status

male-dominated control mechanism, and so

and was happy to be photographed in them.

the hat – fashion’s central frivolity, symbolizing

She wore them as leisure and country wear,

convention, femininity and making you look

maintaining the casual, youthful stylishness of

like your mother – was more ‘burnt’ than the

Hollywood stars like Hepburn and Grace Kelly,

symbolic bra. Children had often been excused

a look that was a startling contrast to earlier

hats, so hatlessness along with short hair,

royal headgear. Like the turban, it was a simple

mini-skirts and flat shoes, became part of the

piece of cloth – preferably silk – which could be

Jean Shrimpton, rebel-child look. As Francine

tied in several ways according the wearer’s

du Plessix Grey says, ‘the only persons

taste and talent. And even a Hermès scarf was

showing enthusiasm for headgear were

cheaper and less elitist than a Thaarup hat.

members of the counterculture’: Che Guevara

In those transitional years when hats were

berets, coonskin caps and Native American

being discarded, the scarf – respectable, cheap

headbands demonstrated solidarity with

and universally available – met its fashion

political and racial minorities and admiration

moment. Importantly, it lay lightly on bouffant

for primitive cultures.

hairstyles and left no ugly dents on lacquered

But the 1970s was, after all, a decade that

surfaces. Hepburn married her second husband

loved dressing up and if you wanted a hat,

in a Givenchy headscarf/hat, edging it into

what could you wear with flares, maxi skirts

high-end fashion. But younger stars of the

and fringed suede jackets? It hardly

sixties – Brigitte Bardot and Jane Fonda –

constituted a fashion statement, but by some

sporting tiny cheap cotton squares with an

unspoken agreement – certainly not by design

impertinent air, brought it back to earth.

– versions of Bardot’s wide-brimmed hats [167]

Scarves were tied in demure country-girl

became the answer; unstructured and

fashion behind the hair or babyishly, just under

unfinished, they were a milliner’s basic ‘hood’.

the chin, provocatively combined with pouting

Biba, a London store and the decade’s retailing

lips and plunging necklines [166].

success, hung these floppy hats in their shops

Tedium, however, had set in by 1965 – when

where their fin-de-siècle air added to Biba’s

everyone wears a fashion, it’s no longer

‘retro’ style. Elsewhere, to judge by Queen

fashion. Bardot took to big floppy hats, but

Elizabeth’s hats of the seventies, confusion

feminist Fonda was rarely hatted. 1960s

reigned. Though royal hats are not high fashion

feminism was not hat-friendly. Feminists,

they must conform to some extent to the modes

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fashion hats

of the day. The Queen wore turbans, ‘tea-

stood between old and new, between an

166 Jane Fonda in A

cosies’ and quasi-tudor caps, avoiding the

aristocratic, patrician culture where girls were

Walk on the Wild

brims she feared; she also experimented with

largely ignored, and a late twentieth century

the ‘cavalier’ style she later adopted. She never

world in which independent women played

wore a floppy hat, though by the end of the

often powerful roles. Tall, slim and with a face

decade these had flattened and stiffened into

for hats, Diana was a gift to designers. John

shallow saucer shapes, acceptable on less

Boyd’s little plumed tricorne, her ‘going-away’

hippy, more modish women [168].

hat of 1981, became not only her favourite style

Side, June 1961. Below

but inspired a thousand copies. Smaller hats,

Diana and A fter

Stephen Jones has said, are best for one’s

From an old and grand family as well as from a

twenties and thirties, and his white and black

modern broken home, Lady Diana Spencer

trilby for Diana in 1983 shows her preference

9780857851611_txt_app.indb 245

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hats

167 Floppy hat, ca.

for simple shapes. Tricorne or trilby, Glengarry

1975.

bonnet or Jones’s later scarlet and black

right

168 Saucer hats,

matelot, her hats had a jaunty, mildly irreverent

1979.

air; it was a young, uncomplicated look women

Below

169 Princess Diana

could and did emulate. Towards the end of the

in a Philip Somerville

decade, however, something changed – her

hat, 1992.

marriage, as we know, but also her style. It was

Opposite

said she became the creature of fashion designers hungry for publicity. On the other hand, Diana had sharp instincts, and if her marriage was crumbling, she knew no late twentieth century wife need be humiliated. She dressed for publicity, upstaging her husband with dramatic cartwheels or artworks like Philip Somerville’s blue turban hat [169]. After the breakdown of her marriage in 1993 she rarely wore hats; they suited her, but they must have seemed symbolic of a role she had come to hate. Do her hats trace the fashions of two decades? Did she ‘rescue’ hats and influence style? There are moments when fashion, production, decorum and utility come together to make a hat not just a mandatory or festive gesture, but a flattering, must-have component of an outfit: Diana’s hats of the early eighties were like that. Her hats met royal requirements, but they did not distance her from her generation; they were confident, stylish and flirtatious without submitting to received ideas of femininity. She set more styles than she followed, and although her fashion statements of the late eighties were more at home on catwalks than the high street,

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hats

170 Philip Treacy and

by investing in young milliners like Stephen

Isabella Blow, 2003.

Jones and Philip Treacy, she did effect

Grafton Street, Fifth Avenue or Bond Street,

Opposite

something undoubtedly new.

for shopping or taking tea with friends in

Treacy’s hats are not for walking down

hotel lobbies; they are not symbols of class or

T ra-la-la or ‘Proper’ H ats ?

status, nor mandatory items in a woman’s

Hats will always be worn for utilitarian reasons:

from the wearer’s quotidian, bearing little

heads can get cold, hairstyles ruined by rain.

relation to ‘fashion’. Straddling a space

But despite that moment of hat-interest in the

between sculpture, theatre and dress they are

eighties, the fashion hat did not return as a

works of art [170]. But they are desirable,

lasting presence on the high street. Because

celebratory and meant to be noticed. To be

hats are no longer everyday objects, they have

asked if your hat is a ‘Treacy’ is a

become instead newsworthy, and those

compliment. Some actually obscure the face

milliners who survive, celebrities. Their

and are happiest in a gallery. A fashion

‘headpieces’ (not hats) are masterpieces of

journalist has said Treacy is ‘the Brancusi of

technical invention and imaginative power,

hats’60 ; one could go further and say that the

bought by museums as artworks to be

wearer has become a plinth for the art of the

exhibited. The headpiece art-hat – now free of

milliner.

convention and etiquette – has played with

appearance; they are abstractions removed

But something else may be afoot (or

older forms, reinvented, mocked them or moved

ahead). In 2011 an article in The Age, an

into realms of fantasy as extravagant as those of

Australian journal, featured young men and

Marie Antoinette. Couture design, it should be

women wearing trilbies, fedoras and pork

said, is not intended for instant consumption; it

pies in the streets of Melbourne: ‘I can dress

introduces ideas and details that will then be

it up or dress it down’ says one of his trilby;

picked up and reworked into saleable, high

‘it finishes off my outfit’61 says another in her

street form. These headpieces by high profile

fedora. In London in 2016, Stephen Jones,

designers are above all inspirational, and the

interviewed for the financial journal The

hats they inspire can be seen at royal events

Economist, says he has become ‘fascinated

and society weddings, at Ascot, Melbourne,

with doing “the proper hat.”’ This is not a

Kentucky, Longchamps. ‘Mad Hatter’s Day’ is

return to rule-bound status symbols – the

one of the most popular events celebrated at the

young Australians do not see their hats like

Galway Races in Ireland – home of Philip

that. Theirs is a generation that that unlike

Treacy, master of the headpiece.

the last has no fear of hats, no memories of

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them as compulsory. Tony Peto, a Dublin-based

Stephen Jones believes. As a fashion student in

hatter, wants everyone to wear hats again;

the 1970s, he noticed it was the ladies in the

structure and shape are important, he thinks,

hat room who were always laughing; ‘if

with no distracting elements, ‘no tra-la-la

somebody is having a better time, having fun,

hats’.

62

His busy female clients, he says, want

that for me is the purpose of fashion. And I do

stylish, practical hats. His male customers are

think a hat can do that.’63 The everyday

individualistic and with a sense of humour.

pleasure of a hat may be ‘in the air’ again, to do

‘Proper’ hats can be both practical and witty,

with ideas, with the way we live now.

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endnotes

Introduction

12 The Penny Magazine, London: Charles Knight &

1 Stephen Jones, Hats: An Anthology, London: V&A

Co., 1841, p. 45.

Publishing, 2009, p. 51.

13 Quoted in Michael Nevell, Denton and the Archaeology of the Felt Hatting Industry, Manchester:

Chapter 1

The Archaeology of Tameside, vol. 7, p. 83.

1 Stephen Jones, Hats: An Anthology, London: V&A

14 I owe much of the information here to David

Publishing, 2009, p. 51.

Corner’s article ‘The Tyranny of Fashion’, Textile

2 Robert Lloyd, Treatise on Hats, London:

History, vol. 22 (2), 1991, pp. 153–178. This

Thorowgood, 1819, p. 21. Archival reprint, Winterthur

illuminating article draws on a collection of Thomas

Museum, Part 2, 2134.

Davies’ letters.

3 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, London: Penguin,

15 Weedon & George Grossmith, Diary of a Nobody,

1992 (1923), p. 95.

London: Book Society, 1946 [1891], p. 120.

4 Michael Carter, Putting a Face on Things, Sydney:

16 The Stockport Advertiser, 22nd February,

Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1997, p. 113.

1889, p. 3.

5 Elizabeth Jenkins, The Tortoise and the Hare,

17 In what follows I owe an inestimable debt to

London: Virago, 2010 (1954), p. 5.

Veronica Main, until June 2015 curator of the Luton

6 George Augustus Sala, The Hats of Humanity,

Museum, and an internationally acknowledged

Manchester: James Gee, 1870, p. 11.

authority on the art of straw and in particular of

7 It takes forty pelts to make one top-quality Stetson.

straw hats.

8 E. E. Rich, The Hudson Bay Company, London:

18 John Dony, A History of the Straw Hat Industry,

Hudson’s Bay Record Society, 1957, p. 14

Luton: The Leagrave Press, 1942, p. 88.

9 A. Young, A Six Month’s Tour through the North of

19 Quoted in Stephen Bunker, Strawopolis,

England, vol. 3, London: W. Nicoll, 1771. Quoted in

Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 1999, p. 6.

Penny McKnight, Stockport Hatting, Stockport

20 Aage Thaarup, Heads and Tales, London: Cassel

Community Services Division, 2000.

& Co., 1956, p. 76.

10 Padraic Flanagan, ‘The Lollipop Lady’s Garden

21 Alison Adburgham, Shops and Shopping, London:

Shed Gets National Treasure Status’, 21 March 2014,

Cassell & Co., 1964, p. 106.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment

22 K. Carmichael, D. McOmish and D. Grech, The

/conservation/10714510/Lollipop-ladys-garden-shed

Hat Industry of Luton & Its Buildings, Swindon:

-gets-national-treasure-status.html.

English Heritage, 2013, p. 40.

11 Harry Bernstein, The Invisible Wall, London: Arrow

23 Ibid., p. 29.

Books, 2007, p. 3.

24 Grossmith, p. 58.

250

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endnotes

25 Arnold Bennett, Old Wives’ Tale, Oxford: World

Chapter 2

Classics, 1995 [1908], p. 80.

1 Daisy Ashford, The Young Visiters, London: Chatto

26 Thaarup, p. 7.

& Windus, 1984 [1919], p. 53.

27 Ibid., p. 84.

2 Michael Harrison, The History of the Hat, London:

28 Interview with designer Wendy Edmonds, 2013.

Herbert Jenkins, 1960, p. 32.

29 Fanny Burney, The Wanderer, Oxford: World’s

3 Frederick Willis, A Book of London Yesterdays,

Classics, 1991 [1814], pp. 426, 427.

London: Phoenix House, 1960, pp. 149–50.

30 Francine du Plessix Grey, Them, London: Penguin,

4 Linda Colley, Britons, New Haven: Yale University

2005, p. 22.

Press, 1992, p. 233.

31 Amy Louise Erikson, ‘Working London: Eleanor

5 I owe this useful bit of information to Professor

Mosely and other Milliners in the City of London

Aileen Ribeiro.

Companies 1700-1750’, The History Workshop

6 Charlotte Louise Henrietta Papendiek, Court and

Journal, Issue 71, 27 May 2014, pp. 163, 164.

Private Life in the Time of Queen Charlotte,

32 George Gissing, In the Year of Jubilee, Create

Memphis, Tennessee: General Books, 2012 [1887],

Space Independent Publishing, 2012 (1898), p. 256.

pp. 52, 53.

33 Ruth Iskin, Modern Women and Parisian

7 Jane Ridley, Bertie: A Life of Edward VII, London:

Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting,

Chatto & Windus, 2012, p. 472.

Cambridge: C.U.P., 2007, pp. 48–113.

8 Valerie Cumming, Royal Dress, London: Batsford,

34 Iskin, p. 68.

1989, p. 105.

35 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, London: Penguin,

9 Ibid., p. 132

1991 [1925], pp. 95, 156.

10 The Duke of Windsor, A Family Album, London:

36 Frederick Willis, A Book of London Yesterdays,

Cassell, 1960, p. 57.

London: Phoenix House, 1960, p. 151.

11 Philip Mansel, Dressed to Rule, New Haven &

37 Ibid., pp. 97, 101.

London: Yale University Press, 2005, p. 142.

38 Ibid., p. 117.

12 Lady Cynthia Colville, Crowded Life, London: Evans

39 Pamela Hansford Johnson, Cork Street, Next to

Brothers, 1963, p. 113.

the Hatter’s, London: Penguin Books, 1968

13 Jessica Douglas-Home, A Glimpse of Empire,

[1965], p. 16.

Norwich: Michael Russell, 2011, p. 48.

40 Willis, pp. 133, 134.

14 John Betjeman, ‘The Death of George V.’ Collected

41 Ibid., p. 143.

Poems, ed., Andrew Motion, London: John Murray,

42 Frank Whitbourn, Mr. Lock of St. James’s Street,

2006, p. 35.

London: Heinemann, 1971, pp. 52, 53.

15 Ibid., pp. 131, 152.

251

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endnotes

16 I owe this and earlier observations to the kindness

29 Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers, London:

of Steve Lane who talked about his work in his atelier

Penguin Classics, 1983 [1857], p. 446.

in Luton in November 2012.

30 Anthony Trollope, Framley Parsonage, Oxford:

17 Aage Thaarup, Heads and Tales, London: Cassell

World’s Classics, 2000 [1861], p. 236.

& Co., 1956, p. 159.

31 Barbara Pym, Excellent Women, London: Cape,

18 Apparently her hats were padded inside to

1952, p. 13.

increase their height. I owe this nugget to an editor of

32 Percy Dearmer, The Parson’s Handbook, London:

the journal Costume.

Grant Richards, 1899, p. 87.

19 Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph, 23 April 2012, ‘A

33 Pym, p. 22.

dismal decade when defeat was in the air’, 23. April

34 ‘The Homilies of St. John Chrysostom on the First

2012. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/

Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians’, John Henry

columnists/charlesmoore/9220312/A-dismal-decade

Parker, A Library of the Fathers of the Holy Catholic

-when-defeat-was-in-the-air.html

Church, anterior to the Division of East and West, vol

20 Janet Mayo, A History of Ecclesiastical Dress,

IV, Oxford, 1839.

London: Batsford, 1984, p. 66.

35 The Daily Telegraph, 26 February 2015, p. 3.

21 The issue resurfaced in 1932, at another politically

‘Victoria Cross Hero Joshua Leaky receives medal’,

tense moment, when President de Valera of the new

Ben Farmer, 26. February, 2015. http://www

Irish Republic attended a British Empire Conference

.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/11534581

in morning dress, having earlier met the papal legate

/Victoria-Cross-hero-Joshua-Leakey-receives-medal

in a trilby. ‘They wore slouch hats for Christ the King’,

.html

said a Dublin wit, ‘and toppers for King George.’

36 Colin McDowell, Hats, London: Thames and

22 Quoted in Mayo, p. 111.

Hudson, 1997, p. 31.

23 H.J. Clayton, Cassock and Gown, Oxford, 1929,

37 Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, London: Penguin

cited in Mayo, p. 73.

Books, 1979 [1938], p. 23.

24 Quoted in Mayo, p. 91.

38 McDowell, p. 29.

25 George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, Oxford:

39 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, London: Penguin

Oxford World Classics, 1999 [1858], p. 7.

Classics, 1980 [1745], p. 772.

26 A.T. Hart & E. Carpenter, The Nineteenth Century

40 Fanny Burney, The Wanderer, Oxford: World’s

Country Parson, Shrewsbury, Wilding & Son, 1954, p. 32.

Classics, 1991 [1814], p. 356.

27 Charlotte Bronte, Shirley, Oxford: World’s Classics,

41 George Moore, A Drama in Muslin, London:

1998, pp. 7, 296, 258.

Heinemann, 1936 [1886], p. 17.

28 Anthony Trollope, The Warden, London: Penguin

42 Michael Arlen, The Green Hat, London: Capuchin

Classics, 1984 [1855], pp. 12, 42, 163, 27.

Classics, 2008 [1924], p. 15.

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endnotes

Chapter 3

14 Quoted in Phillis Cunnington, Occupational

1 Alison Lurie, The Language of Clothes, New York:

Costume, London: A. C. Black, 1967, p. 323.

Random House, 1981, p. 19.

15 Mrs. J. E. Panton, Within Four Walls, London: ‘The

2 John Rae, quoted in Alexander Davidson, Blazers,

Gentlewoman’, 1893, pp. 128, 129.

Badges and Boaters, Horndean: Scope Press,

16 Ambulance World, see above.

1990, p. ix.

17 Mrs. Humphry Ward, Marcella, London: Virago

3 I owe this and many of the following anecdotes and

Press, 1984, p. 398.

picture references to Alexander Davidson’s book on

18 See Cunnington, pp. 322, 323.

school uniform; see above.

19 ‘Celebrating Nurses: What Happened to the Cap?’,

4 See The Dictionary of Victorian London, www

http://www.medscape.com/features/nurse-caps.

.VictorianLondon.org/education/Christshospital.htm.

20 ‘Celebrating Nurses’, p. 1.

5 Frederick Willis, A Book of London Yesterdays,

21 Interview in The Telegraph, London, 15 November

London: Phoenix House, 1960, p. 38.

2012.

6 The Hatter’s Gazette, July 1878, p. 620.

22 Interview with Barbara Jury, former nurse, You

7 Anne de Courcy, 1939, The Last Season, London:

Tube, SoCal Studio, 2010.

Phoenix, 1989, pp. 211–215.

23 Penelope Stokes, Norland: 1892–1992, Newbury:

8 Letter of Mother Mary Gundred, pupil at St.

Abbey Press, 1992, p. 27.

Leonard’s-Mayfield, 1888–93. This and much of what

24 The term ‘fontange’ is often used of this style

follows I owe to correspondence with Sister Helen

though strictly speaking it describes the hairstyle and

Forshaw, archivist of St. Leonard’s and other schools

cap, not the frilled fan.

of the Order of the Holy Child Jesus.

25 Joseph Addison, The Spectator Papers, no. 98,

9 Reminiscences of Mother Mary Alexius O’Neil,

June, 1711.

1948. Pupil at St. Leonard’s, 1874–79. See above.

26 John Styles, Dress of the People, New Haven &

10 Correspondence with Lyn Constable-Maxwell,

London: Yale University Press, 2007, p. 52.

September 2012. Former pupils of St. Mary’s also

27 Aileen Ribeiro, Dress in Eighteenth Century

testified to the horrors of the chapel cap on the Old

Europe, New Haven & London: Yale University Press,

Girls’ website, SMOG.

2002, p. 82.

11 Ronald Frame, Penelope’s Hat, London: Sceptre

28 Thea Holme, The Carlyles at Home, London:

Press, 1990, p. 109.

Persephone Books, 2008 [1965], p. 22.

12 Anon., Ambulance Work and Nursing, ‘An 1895

29 Styles, p. 286.

Look at Nursing’. RN.http://ENW.org.

30 Samuel Richardson, Pamela, London: Penguin

13 Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, London:

Books, 1980 [1741], pp. 77, 87.

Wordsworth Classics, 1994, pp. 307, 401.

31 Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Chapter 47.

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endnotes

32 Thomas Hardy, ‘The Dorsetshire Labourer’,

Chapter 4

Longman’s Magazine, vol. 2 (1883), pp. 258–259.

1 Frederick Willis, A Book of London Yesterdays,

33 Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford, London:

London: Phoenix House, 1960, p. 277.

Penguin Books, 1973 [1939], p. 160.

2 John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga, vol. 1, A Man of

34 Quoted in Christina Walkley, The Way to Wear’Em,

Property, London: Penguin Books, 2001 [1906], p.14.

150 Years of Punch on Fashion, London: Peter Owen,

3 Ibid., p. 15.

1985, p. 32.

4 Clive Aslet, Anyone for England, London: Little,

35 Perilla Kinchin, Tea and Taste: The Glasgow

Brown, 1997; quoted in Henry Hitchings, Sorry! The

Tearooms, Wendlebury: White Cockade, 1991,

English and Their Manners, London: John Murray,

p. 59.

2013, p. 295.

36 Kinchin, p. 66.

5 John Wanamaker, The Etiquette of an Englishman’s

37 William Thackeray, ‘A Little Dinner at Timmins’, in

Dress, New York, 1910; quoted in Brent Shannon,

Miscellanies, vol. 7, London: Adamant Media Corp,

The Cut of His Coat, Athens: Ohio University Press,

2012 [1857] p. 17.

2006, p. 148.

38 Quoted in Cunnington, p. 134.

6 George Augustus Sala, The Hats of Humanity,

39 Anthony Trollope, He Knew He Was Right, Oxford:

Manchester: James Gee, 1874, p.60.

World’s Classics, 1998 [1869], p. 112.

7 Galsworthy, p. 15.

40 George Eliot, Adam Bede, Oxford: World Classics,

8 G. P. Fox, Fashion, The Power That Influences the

1987 [1859], p. 2.

World, London: Sheldon & Co., 1872, pp. 17–18.

41 Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, London:

Quoted in Christopher Breward, The Hidden

Wordsworth Classics, 1992 [1850], p. 136.

Consumer, Manchester: Manchester University Press,

42 Charles Dickens, The Uncommercial Traveller,

1999, p. 44.

p. 263.

9 Frederick Willis, A Book of London Yesterdays,

43 Albert Smith et al., Sketches of London, Milton

London: Phoenix House, 1960, p. 152, 137.

Keynes: Dodo Press, 2012 [1849], p. 59.

10 Ibid., p. 152.

44 Thompson, p. 485.

11 Quoted in Colin McDowell, The Literary Companion

45 Cunnington, p. 268.

to Fashion, London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1995, p. 318.

46 Prudence Black, The Flight Attendant’s Shoe,

12 G. A. Sala, The Hats of Humanity, Manchester:

Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2011, p. 85.

James Gee, Hatter, 1870, p. 16.

47 Ibid., p. 145.

13 See Shannon, p. 103.

48 Black, p. 327.

14 George Gissing, A Life’s Morning, Boston:

49 Cunnington, pp. 389, 390.

IndyPublish.com, 2012 [1888], p. 135.

50 Thompson, p. 355.

15 Galsworthy, pp. 140, 84, 336.

254

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endnotes

16 Charles Dickens, Bleak House, London:

34 A product derived from an insect found in

Wordsworth Classics, 2004 [1855], p. 164.

India used to stiffen cocked hats as well as top hats

17 The Hatter’s Gazette, August 1878, p. 690.

and bowlers.

18 Conan Doyle, The Complete Illustrated Sherlock

35 It was actually a deerstalker, perfectly acceptable

Holmes, London: Chancellor Press, 1987 [1892],

for travel – Hardie had just come off the train.

p. 127.

36 George Hayter, The House of Commons, 1833,

19 H. G. Wells, The History of Mr. Polly, London:

The National Portrait Gallery, London.

Everyman, 1993 [1910], p. 46.

37 Quoted in Neil Steinberg, Hatless Jack, London:

20 Lloyd, p. 36.

Granta Books, 2005, pp. 73, 74.

21 H. G. Wells, Ann Veronica, London: Everyman,

38 Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing

1999 [1909], p. 72.

Modern Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter,

22 Lloyd, p. 37.

Princeton: Princeton U.P., 2002 [1994], p. 146.

23 Robert Surtees, Jorrocks Jaunts & Jollities,

39 Both hats were named after theatrical heroines.

London, BiblioBazaar, 2009 [1838], p. 151.

Fedora by Victorien Sardou, was a hit in America in

24 Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning

1882, as was Trilby by George duMaurier in London

of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton & Fred

in 1885.

Rothwell, New York: The Macmillan Co., 1914, p. 3.

40 Debbie Henderson, Hat Talk, Yellow Springs, Ohio:

25 Willis, pp. 139, 151.

Wild Goose Press, 2002, pp. 80, 83, 86.

26 John Thompson, Victorian London Street Life, New

41 Willis, pp. 137, 138.

York: Dover Publications, 1994 [1877], p. 57.

42 Bram Stoker, Dracula, London: Penguin Classics,

27 Ibid., pp. 133, 144.

1993 [1897], p. 408.

28 Stephen Jones, quoted in The Telegraph, 28 May

43 Mrs Humphry, Manners for Men, Exeter: Webb &

2014, www.telegraph.co.uk/menfashion-and-style

Bower, 1979 [1897], p. 115.

/10803883/hat-tricks-how-to-look-good-in-a-hat.html

44 Harrison, p. 161.

29 Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits, New York: Knopf,

45 C. Willet & Phillis Cunnington, Handbook of

1994, p. 49.

English Costume in the 19th Century, London: Faber

30 Galsworthy, p. 410.

& Faber, 1966, pp. 223, 252.

31 Ibid., p. 661.

46 The Hatter’s Gazette, September 1894, p. 479.

32 Colin Rosie as told to Jeremy Taylor, The Financial

47 Ibid., p. 341.

Times, 26 February 2016.

48 Willis, p. 138.

33 Alfred Loos, ‘Men’s Hats’ (1894), quoted in D. L.

49 ‘The Major’, Clothes and the Man, London: Grant

Purdy, The Rise of Fashion, Minneapolis: University of

Richards, 1900, p. 192.

Minnesota Press, 2004, p. 99.

50 Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives’ Tale, Oxford:

255

9780857851611_txt_app.indb 255

1/12/17 10:51 AM

endnotes

World’s Classics, 1995 [1911], p. 471.

Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1998 [1862],

51 Christopher Breward, The Hidden Consumer,

pp. 249, 252, 254.

Manchester: Manchester U.P., 1999, p. 59.

69 Galsworthy, pp. 208, 313.

52 Panama Hat Company, ‘History of Panama Hats’,

70 Gwen Raverat, Period Piece, London: Faber &

www.panamahats.co.uk/pages/History-of-Panama

Faber, 1960 [1952], pp. 260, 256.

-Hats.html, accessed 8 May 2013.

71 Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiastical of the

53 Wells, pp. 45, 102, 124.

Church of England: Of Divine Services and

54 Ibid., pp. 149, 157, 173, 250, 253.

Sacraments, 1604, http://www.anglican.net

55 Ibid., p. 326.

/doctrines/1604-canon-law, accessed 28 November

56 Modern Etiquette, London: Frederick Warne, c.

2015. I owe this information to a letter on hat

1890, p. 47.

etiquette, The Daily Telegraph, 27 November 2015.

57 A Member of the Aristocracy, Manners and Rules

72 Charles Dickens, The Uncommercial Traveller,

of Good Society, London: Frederick Warne, 1892,

London: Chapman & Hall, 1906 [1859], p. 327.

p. 31.

73 Willis, 101 Jubilee Road, p. 70.

58 Mrs. Humphry, Manners for Men, Exeter: Webb &

74 Thomas Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta, London:

Bower, 1979 [1897], p. 17.

Everyman, 1998 [1876], p. 139.

59 The American Gentleman’s Guide to Politeness

75 Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree,

and Fashion, New York: Daley & Jackson, 1859, pp.

London: Penguin, 1998 [1872], pp. 132, 133.

130, 131.

76 Manners and Rules of Good Society, p. 223.

60 Henry James, The American, London: Penguin,

77 George Eliot, Middlemarch, New York: Norton,

1991 [1876], pp. 405, 410.

2000 [1871], p. 340.

61 Willis, p. 151.

78 Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta, p. 124.

62 Willis, 101 Jubilee Road, p. 21.

79 William Thackeray, Vanity Fair, London: Penguin,

63 H. G. Wells, Kipps, London: Penguin Classics,

1968 [1847], p. 260.

2005 [1905], p. 203.

80 Colin McDowell, The Literary Companion to

64 Henry James, The Princess Casamassima,

Fashion, London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1995,

Fairfield: Augustus Kelley, 1976 [1888], p. 305.

p. 215.

65 A Member of the Aristocracy, Manners and Rules

81 Henry James, Roderick Hudson, London: Penguin,

of Good Society, London: Frederick Warne, 1892,

1986 [1875], p. 286.

p. 31.

82 A.H. Izard, letter to The Daily Telegraph, 23

66 Mrs. Humphry, pp. 122, 123.

November 2015.

67 James, Princess Casamassima, p. 292.

83 Mrs. John Sherwood, Manners and Social Usages,

68 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations,

New York: Harper Bros., 1884, p. 293.

256

9780857851611_txt_app.indb 256

1/12/17 10:51 AM

endnotes

84 Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta, p. 150.

5 Fred Miller Robinson, The Man in the Bowler Hat,

85 Richard Wells, Manners, Culture & Dress of the

Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina

Best American Society, Springfield, Mass.; King,

Press, 1993, p. ix.

Richardson & Co., 1891, p. 338.

6 The Hatter’s Gazette, September 1878, p. 743.

86 Anne Edwards & Drusilla Beyfus, Lady Behave: a

7 Ibid., p. 741.

Guide to Modern Manners for the ’70s, London:

8 The Hatter’s Gazette, October 1878, p. 855.

Cassell, 1969, p. 290.

9 Michael Carter, Putting a Face on Things, Sydney:

87 George Moore, Esther Waters, London: Walter

Power Publications, 1997, p. 113.

Scott, 1894 [1885], pp. 254, 257, 259, 260.

10 Robinson, p. 25.

88 Anne Edwards & Drusilla Beyfus, Lady Behave,

11 R. C. Sheriff, A Fortnight in September, London:

p. 290.

Persephone Books, 2006 [1931], p. 51.

89 Harry Graham, The Perfect Gentleman, London:

12 Robinson, p. 53.

Edward Arnold, 1912, pp. 47, 49.

13 George and Weedon Grossmith, Diary of a Nobody,

90 Correspondence with Prudence Black, 19

London: The Book Society, 1946 [1892], pp. 168, 153.

September 2013.

14 Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy, New

91 Galsworthy, Swan Song, pp. 655, 656, 663.

York: Signet Classics, 2000 [1925], p. 55.

92 Katherine Horwood, Keeping Up Appearances,

15 D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, London: Penguin

London: The History Press, 2011, p. 9.

Books, 1987 [1920], p. 419, 458.

93 A. H. Izard, letter to The Daily Telegraph, 23

16 Hats play major roles in children’s fiction –

November 2015.

particularly illustrated books. Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the

94 Quoted in Horwood, pp. 111, 112.

Hat is a typical example, basically comic but with a

95 Galsworthy, p. 792.

wild, darker side. The topic is unfortunately too big to be covered here.

Chapter 5

17 Correspondence with Kit Constable-Maxwell,

1 Arthur Nightingale, Clerk of Works at the University

January 2014.

of Buckingham, was still wearing a bowler at work in

18 Benjamin Black (John Banville), The Silver Swan,

the 1980s.

London: Picador, 2007, p. 80.

2 Frank Whitbourn, ‘Mr. Lock of St. James’s Street’,

19 Robinson, p. 166.

London: Heinemann, 1971, p.123.

20 Grace Glueck, ‘A Bottle Is a Bottle’, The New York

3 George Moore, ‘Esther Waters’ London: Walter

Times, 19 December 1965.

Scott, 1894 (1885), p. 260.

21 The Hatter’s Gazette, November 1878, p. 336.

4 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being,

22 Chip hats and bonnets were made of woven willow

London: Faber & Faber, 1984, p. 84.

strips, much cheaper than Italian hats.

257

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endnotes

23 Professor Toshio Kusamitsu, historian of Tokyo

39 Anthony Trollope, Mr. Scarborough’s Family,

University, believes that despite the lacquer box,

Oxford: World’s Classics, 1989 [1883], p. 149.

Japan is an unlikely source, having no hat tradition,

40 The Hatter’s Gazette, September 1894, p. 479.

and suggests China instead.

41 Amy de la Haye, Lou Taylor and Eleanor

24 ‘Coromandel Coast’, http//www.meg-andrews.com

Thompson, A Family of Fashion, London: Philip

/item-details/Coromandel-Coast/7120. Accessed

Wilson, 2005, p. 47.

24/11/2016.

42 John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga, vol. 3, ‘Maid in

25 The Hatter’s Gazette, June 1894, p. 316.

Waiting’, London: Penguin Books, 2001 [1931],

26 Samuel Richardson, Pamela, London: Penguin

p. 55.

Books, 1980 [1740], pp. 77, 87.

43 Patrick White, Riders in the Chariot, Penguin

27 Thorstein Veblen’s ‘trickle down’ theory argued that

Books. 1961, p. 9.

upper-class styles were imitated by the lower classes.

44 Aage Thaarup, Heads and Tales, London: Cassell

28 Ribeiro, Aileen, Dress in Eighteenth Century

& Co., 1956, pp. 1, 235

Europe, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2002, p. 84.

Chapter 6

29 Quoted in Ribeiro, p. 84.

1 Anne Hollander, Moving Pictures, Cambridge:

30 Ribeiro, p. 82.

Harvard University Press, 1991, pp. 3, 4.

31 Maria Edgeworth, Helen, London: Sort of Books,

2 James Laver, Costume in the Theatre, London:

2010 [1834], p. 66.

George Harrap & Co., Ltd., 1964, p. 67.

32 Ribeiro, p. 285.

3 Stella Mary Newton, Renaissance Theatre Costume,

33 Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge, London:

London: Rapp & Whiting, 1975, pp. 82, 88.

Penguin Classics, 2003 [1841], p. 58.

4 William Congreve, The Way of the World, Act II,

34 Wikipedia, Dolly Varden web page, accessed 10

sc. iv.

April 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_Varden

5 Aileen Ribeiro, ‘Costuming the Part: A Discourse of

_(costume)

Fashion and Fiction in the Image of the Actress in

35 Cunnington, Handbook of English Costume in the

England, 1776-1812’, in Robyn Asleson, ed.,

19th Century, pp. 510, 493.

Notorious Muse, London: Yale University Press,

36 A Brief History of the Dolly Varden Dress Craze.

2003, p. 111.

zipzipinkspot.blogspot.com/2008/08/brief-history-of

6 The engravings are from editions of Bell’s British

-dolly-varden-dress.html

Theatre, published in London, 1777, 1776, 1791.

37 Ibid.

7 Ribeiro, p. 112.

38 Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister, London:

8 There may be a subtext here: the figurine is a

Penguin, 1994 [1875], p. 319.

souvenir of Kemble’s performance of 1802, a time

258

9780857851611_txt_app.indb 258

1/12/17 10:51 AM

endnotes

when during the king’s intermittent bouts of insanity,

20 Ibid., p. 26.

the Prince of Wales as Regent became quite impatient

21 From The Importance of Being Earnest: The First

to be king.

Production, ed. Joseph Donahue and Ruth Berggren,

9 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Table Talk’, 27 April

Colin Smythe Ltd, 1995; quoted in www.vam.ac.uk

1823.

/content/articles/t/importance-of-being-earnest

10 British drama after the granting of patents to two

-costume-design, accessed 16 August 2016.

London theatres in 1660 was divided into ‘legitimate’

22 For the London production this became ‘Sonia’.

(classics and contemporary plays) played in the

23 Art was imitating life, as chorus girls were

licenced theatres, and ‘illegitimate’ (farces,

concurrently marrying into the British aristocracy.

melodramas, burlesques) played in theatres licenced

24 Quoted in Lucile Ltd, eds. Valerie Mendes and

only to perform music. Recent research has

Amy De La Haye, London: V&A Publishing, 2009,

suggested the divide was more blurred than this

p. 186.

might suggest and limiting the performance of plays

25 Quoted from Lucile’s autobiography, http://www

to patent theatres became unsustainable. The

.lily-elsie.com/hats.htm, accessed 16 August 2016.

Kembles offered melodramas as well as

26 Marlis Schweitzer, When Broadway Was the

Shakespeare.

Runway, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

11 Harry Graham, The Perfect Gentleman, London:

Press, 2009, pp. 2, 4, 9.

Edward Arnold, 1912, p. 42.

27 Souvenir programme for Paris, First National

12 Colin McDowell, Hats, London: Thames and

Pictures, 1928.

Hudson, 1997.

28 Deborah Landis, Hollywood Costume, London:

13 Deborah Landis, ed., Hollywood Costume, London:

V&A Publishing, 2012, p. 18.

V&A Publishing, 2012, pp. 100–101.

29 Aage Thaarup, Heads and Tales, London: Cassell

14 Raoul Sobel & David Francis, Chaplin: Genesis of a

& Co., 1956, p. 65.

Clown, London: Quartet Books, 1977, p. 165.

30 Lilly Dachè, Talking Through My Hats, New York:

15 Landis, p. 102.

Coward-McCann, Inc., 1946, pp. 158–160.

16 Fred Miller Robinson, The Man in the Bowler Hat,

31 Thaarup, p. 65.

Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina

32 Landis, p. 14.

Press, 1993.

33 Edward Maeder, Hollywood and History, London:

17 Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits, New York: Knopf,

Thames and Hudson, 1987, p. 127

1994, p. 55.

34 Landis, p. 19.

18 Ibid., p. 9.

35 Ronald Frame, Penelope’s Hat, London: Sceptre,

19 Michelle Major, ed., Staging Fashion: 1880 ­–1920,

1990, p. 380.

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012, p. 6.

36 Landis, pp. 147, 148.

259

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endnotes

37 Ibid., p. 148.

16 Habits of Good Society, pp. 186, 187.

38 Maeder, p. 95.

17 In 2013 helmets were made obligatory for sporting

39 Landis, p. 143.

events except when competing.

40 Ibid., p. 82.

18 Pierce Egan, The Adventures of Tom, Jerry and Logic, 1828, quoted in Cunnington, p. 177.

Chapter 7

19 George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, Oxford: Oxford

1 Colin McDowell, Hats, London: Thames and

Classics, 2014 [1876], p. 78.

Hudson, 1997, p. 78.

20 Francis Hayman, Cricket as Played in the

2 Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington,

Mary-Le-Bone Fields, 1744.

London: Penguin Classics, 1991 [1864], p. 242.

21 Quoted in Cunnington, p. 15.

3 Quoted in Phillis Cunnington & Alan Mansfield,

22 Phil Hughes, ‘Could head injuries be eliminated?’

English Costume for Sports and Outdoor Recreation,

BBC News Magazine, 27 November 2014. www.bbc

London: A. & C. Black, 1969, p. 101.

.com/news/magazine-30206381

4 Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 435, July 19,

23 Quoted in Cunnington, p. 71.

1712, from www.gutenberg.org/files.

24 McDowell, p. 80.

5 Norwich Castle Museum.

25 Quoted in Cunnington, p. 87.

6 Cunnington, p. 115.

26 Ibid., p. 93.

7 Robert Surtees, Jorrocks Jaunts and Jollities, London:

27 Daisy Ashford, The Young Visiters, London: Chatto

Serenity Publishing, 2009 [1838], pp. 19, 144.

and Windus, 1920 [1919], p. 73.

8 Ibid., pp. 12, 89.

28 Tam O’Shanter is the eponymous hero of Robert

9 Ibid., p. 167.

Burns’ narrative poem of 1791, describing the drunken

10 The Habits of Good Society, London: James Hogg,

flight of Tam from a coven of witches. The cap, also

1853, p. 156.

known as the Scots bonnet, was traditional Scottish

11 William Thackeray, Pendennis, Oxford: Oxford

headwear. The popularity of the poem made Tam

World Classics, 1999 [1850], p. 748.

Scotland’s most famous character and though Burns

12 Robert Surtees, Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tours,

does not specify headwear, the bonnet was shown in

London: Nonsuch Classics, 2006 [1853], pp. 18, 286.

illustrations to the poem and thereafter took his name.

13 The tricornes of lady members of a French hunt

29 Ada Ballin, The Science of Dress, 1885, quoted in

are attached to their habits by black silk cords.

Cunnington, p. 239.

14 Horace Mayhew, Model Women and Children,

30 Quoted in Cunnington, p. 234.

London: D. Bogue, 1848, pp. 50, 54, 57.

31 H.G. Wells, Mr Polly, London: Everyman, 1993

15 Robert Surtees, Plain or Ringlets?, London:

[1910], p. 1.

Methuen, 1937 [1860], pp. 14, 195.

32 Quoted in Cunnington, p. 246.

260

9780857851611_txt_app.indb 260

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endnotes

Chapter 8

16 Fanny Burney, The Wanderer, Oxford: World’s

1 Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford, London:

Classics, 1991 [1814], p. 426.

Penguin, 1973 [1939], pp. 103, 300.

17 Venetia Murray, An Elegant Madness, London:

2 Giles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion, Princeton:

Viking, 1998, p. 83.

Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 47.

18 Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, London:

3 Quentin Bell, On Human Finery, London: The

Wordsworth Classics, 2004 [1838], p. 192.

Hogarth Press, 1947, p. 41.

19 Maria Edgeworth, Helen, London: Sort of Books,

4 Danae Tankard, ‘Giles Moore’s Clothes’, Costume:

2010 [1834], p. 239.

The Journal of the Costume Society, vol. 49, n. 1,

20 George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, London:

January 2015, p. 34.

Everyman, 1966 [1860], pp. 81, 82.

5 Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure, Oxford: OUP,

21 Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, pp. 134, 270, 471.

2005, p. 21.

22 Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, London: Wordsworth

6 Amy Erikson records an especially successful

Classics, 2004 [1855], p. 716.

Bath milliner in 1740, Ann Chandler, whose

23 C. W. Cunnington, Feminine Attitudes in the

business continued late into the century –

19th Century, London: William Heinemann, 1935,

perhaps the milliner in Jane Austen’s Northanger

p. 132.

Abbey?

24 Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes,

7 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, London: Penguin,

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993,

1995 [1818], p. 37.

p. 361.

8 Fred Willis, A Book of London Yesterdays, London:

25 Thackeray deliberately put his characters in the

Phoenix House, 1960, p. 133.

styles of his own time rather than those of 1815.

9 Aileen Ribeiro, Dress in 18th Century Europe, New

26 William Thackeray, Vanity Fair, London:

Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 4.

Wordsworth Classics, 1992 [1848], pp. 358, 393.

10 Lipovetsky, pp. 28, 31.

27 Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives’ Tale, Oxford:

11 Quoted in Michael Carter, Fashion Classics,

World’s Classics, 1995 [1908], pp. 307, 365, 499.

London: Berg, 2003, p. 77.

28 John Dony, A History of the Straw Hat Industry,

12 Maria Edgeworth, Harrington, Milton Keynes: Dodo

Luton: Gibbs, Bamforth & Co., 1942, p. 155.

Press, 2015, p. 121.

29 The Ladies’ Companion, London: Rogerson & Co.,

13 Ribeiro, p. 68.

1851, p. 54.

14 Deirdre Le Faye, ed., Jane Austen’s Letters,

30 Phillis Cunnington, The Perfect Lady, London: Max

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 44.

Parrish, 1948, p. 54.

15 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Oxford: Oxford

31 Henry James, The Princess Casamassima,

University Press, 1923 [1813], pp. 219, 221.

Fairfield, USA: Augustus Kelly, 1976, Vol. 1, p. 57.

261

9780857851611_txt_app.indb 261

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endnotes

32 See Michael Carter’s essay on nineteenth century

48 Paul Morand, The Allure of Chanel, London:

hats in Putting a Face on Things, Sydney: Power

Pushkin Press, 2008 [1976], pp. 73, 119.

Publications, 1997.

49 Anne de Courcy, The Last Season, London:

33 Cunnington, p. 62.

Phoenix, 1989, p. 85.

34 Henry James, What Maisie Knew, Oxford: OUP,

50 Julie Summers, Fashion on the Ration, London:

1996 [1897], p. 225.

Profile Books, 2015, p. 151.

35 Thompson, p. 303.

51 Theodora Fitzgibbon, A Taste of Love, Dublin: Gill

36 Sarah Stein, Plumes, London: Yale University

& Macmillan, 2015, p. 130.

Press, 2008, p. 20.

52 Aage Thaarup, Heads and Tales, London: Cassell,

37 Fiona Clark, Hats, London: Batsford, 1982, p. 37.

1956, p. 95.

38 Gwen Raverat, Period Piece, London: Faber &

53 Francine du Plessix Grey, Them, London: Penguin,

Faber, 1954, pp. 217, 114.

2005, pp. 252, 297.

39 John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga, Vol. II,

54 Colin McDowell, Hats, London: Thames &

London: Penguin Books, 2001 [1924], p. 685.

Hudson, 1997, p. 152.

40 François Mauriac, Thérèse Desqueyroux, Paris:

55 McDowell, p. 153.

Grasset, 1989 [1927], p. 131 (my translation).

56 Thaarup, pp. 13, 144, 137.

41 D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, London:

57 Elizabeth Jenkins, The Tortoise and the Hare,

Penguin, 1995 [1925], pp. 12, 150.

London: Virago, 2010 [1954], pp. 5, 115, 233.

42 Lilly Daché, Talking Through My Hats, New York:

58 du Plessix Grey, p. 375.

Coward McCann, Inc., 1946, pp. 96, 117, 118,

59 Ibid., p. 382.

123, 219.

60 Oriole Cullen, ‘Crowning Glory’, in Claire Wilcox,

43 Daniel Defoe, Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress,

ed., Alexander McQueen, London: V&A Publishing,

Oxford: OUP, 1996 [1724], p. 174.

2015, p. 212.

44 Quoted in Penelope Byrde, Jane Austen Fashion,

61 Felicity Lewis, in The Age, 19 November 2011,

Ludlow: Excellent Press, 1999, p. 36.

p. 25.

45 Daché, p. 219.

62 Deidre McQuillan, ‘Hats Off to a True Original’, in

46 Annie Schneider, Hats by Madame Paulette,

The Irish Times, 14 November 2015, p. 16.

London: Thames & Hudson, 2014, pp. 31, 35. 41.

63 Luke Leitch, ‘The Fine Art of Millinery’, The

47 Ronald Frame, Penelope’s Hat, London: Sceptre,

Economist Magazine, April and May 2016, p. 60.

1990, p. 214.

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Introduction

1 Seaside postcard, 1900. Author’s collection.

Chapter 1

Chapter opener Lock & Co. of London. © Hannah Rigby. Lock & Co. Hatters. 2 Eighteenth century beaver hat. Stockport Heritage Services, courtesy of Hat Works Hatting Museum, UK. 3 Robert Lloyd’s hats and prices, 1819. Author’s collection. 4 Melbourne Hatworks, 2014. Courtesy of Rose Scott, Melbourne. 5 Planking workshop, Hatters at Work, Penny Magazine, 1841. Author’s collection. 6 Nineteenth century Luton houses. © Luton County Museum. 7 Luton straw hats. © Luton County Museum. 8 Mr. Pooter’s helmet from Diary of a Nobody, 1891. Illustration by Weedon Grossmith. Author’s collection. 9 Edgar Degas, At The Milliner’s, Paris, 1882. © 2015 The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence. 10 Nineteenth century top hats, Lloyd’s Treatise on Hats. Author’s collection. 11 ‘Chapellerie May’, Loches, France, 2014. Courtesy of Ben Walker, Loches, France. 12 Lock & Co. of London. © Hannah Rigby. Lock & Co. Hatters.

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Chapter 2

Chapter opener Jacques-Louis David, M. Seriziat, 1795. Photo by Photo12/UIG via Getty Images. 13 Entry of Charles II, 1660. Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images. 14 Thomas Lawrence. George IV, 1822. © The Wallace Collection, London. 15 Queen Victoria’s cap, ca. 1880. Photo by The Print Collector/Getty Images. 16 The Prince (later King Edward VII) and Princess of Wales 1882. Photo by Museum of London/ Heritage Images/Getty Images. 17 Edward VII in a Homburg. Author’s collection. 18 Princess Patricia of Connaught, 1901. Author’s collection. 19 Royal Jubilee, 1935. Author’s collection. 20 Royal family, 1948. Author’s collection. 21 Queen Elizabeth II. Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images. 22 Engraving of Quakers, 1720. Author’s collection. 23 Clerical hat, as worn by actor Norman Forbes (1859–1932) dressed as a cleric. Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images. 24 Household Cavalry, 2014. Julian Calder, courtesy of Dr. William Beaver. 25 Napoleon’s bicorne, 1800. The Mary Evans Picture Library/Reform Club. 26 Wellington’s bicorne, 1800. Stockport Heritage Services, courtesy of Hat Works Hatting Museum. 27 Lord Mayor and Queen Elizabeth at Mrs. Thatcher’s funeral. © European Press Agency Photo. 28 Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830. Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images. 29 Jacques-Louis David, M. Seriziat, 1795. Photo by Photo12/UIG via Getty Images. 30 Slouch hat, 1923. Author’s collection.

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Chapter 3

Chapter opener Two air hostesses walking away from a BOAC Comet, circa 1950. Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images. 31 Nineteenth century Christ’s Hospital cap. Photo by Guildhall Library & Art Gallery/Heritage Images/Getty Images. 32 Eton toppers, 1928. Photo by London Express/Getty Images. 33 School cap, Just William, Richmal Crompton, 1922; jacket of 1944 edition. © Alamy Images. Credit: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo. 34 Girls’ school hats, 1944. Photo by Keystone/Getty Images. 35 St. Leonard’s Convent hats, 1890s. Courtesy of the Order of the Holy Child Jesus. 36 St Mary’s School chapel cap, 1955. Courtesy of Lyn Constable Maxwell. 37 Nurses’ caps, late 1950s. Photo by Mark Jay Goebel/Getty Images. 38 Norland nanny, 2008. Photo by Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images. 39 Heads of Six of Hogarth’s Servants, 1750, William Hogarth. Tate Gallery, London. © Tate, London, 2015. 40 Joseph Highmore, Pamela and Mr. Williams, 1744. By permission of the Syndics of The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK. © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. 41 Wing bonnet, The Swing and the Orchard, Tom Browne, 1900. Author’s collection. 42 Lyon’s tea room ‘Nippy’, 1920. Author’s collection. 43 William Orpen, Le Chef de l’Hotel Chatham, 1921. Photo by Print Collector/Getty Images. 44 Nineteenth century playing cards: Mr. Bung the Brewer, Mr. Chip the Carpenter and Mr. Bones the Butcher. Author’s collection. 45 Policeman’s top hat, 1840. © John Hannavy Picture Collection. 46 Fireman, 1910. © John Hannavy Picture Collection. 47 Postman, 1930s. Author’s collection. 48 Male airline crew, 1938. Author’s collection. 49 Two air hostesses walking away from a BOAC Comet, circa 1950. Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images. 50 Air hostess’s puffball hat, 1968. Photo by Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images. 51 Flight attendant’s hat, 2013. Credit: ViewStock (Getty).

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Chapter 4

Chapter opener Prince Albert in a top hat, 1837. Photo by Otto Herschan/Getty Images. 52 Roger Fry, Self-Portrait, 1930. © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, the Courtauld Gallery, London 53 Prince Albert in a top hat, 1861. Photo by Otto Herschan/Getty Images. 54 Battered top hat, c. 1900. Author’s collection. 55 Top hat, Richard Doyle, The Newcomes, William Thackeray, 1855. Author’s collection. 56 Top hats, Thomas Onwhyn, The Love Match, Henry Cockton, 1847. Author’s collection. 57 Churchill’s Homburg, 1941. Author’s collection. 58 Fedora, 2012 (from the American TV series ‘Mad Men’). Photo by Gonzalo/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images/Getty Images. 59 Panama hat, c. 1900. Photo by LCDM Universal History Archive/Getty Images. 60 ‘Making the Bow’, B. Dandridge & L-P. Boitard, The Rudiments of Genteel Behaviour, London, 1737. Author’s collection. 61 ‘Salutations’, Manners, Culture and Dress, Richard Wells, New York, 1891. Author’s collection. 62 Woman’s picture hat (mourning bonnet), 1910–1920, USA (straw). Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of W. T. Wohlbruck (37.24.108). Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA. 63 Wedding bonnet, Happy Homes and How to Make Them, J.W. Kirton, London, c. 1880. Author’s collection. 64 Racegoers attend Ladies Day of Royal Ascot at Ascot Racecourse on June 16, 2011 in Ascot, England. Photo by Samir Hussein/WireImage/Getty Images. 65 Jean Shrimpton at the Melbourne Cup, 1965. Photo by Fairfax Media/Fairfax Media via Getty Images.

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Chapter 5

Chapter opener Laurel and Hardy, ca. 1940. Michael Ochs Archives/Stringer/Getty Images. 66 Foreman in a bowler, 1937. Author’s collection. 67 Georges Seurat, Bathers at Asnières, 1884. © The National Gallery, London. Bought, Courtauld Fund, 1924. 68 Lupin Pooter, Diary of a Nobody, 1891. Author’s collection. 69 Japanese boy in bowler, ca. 1890. Courtesy of Geoffrey Batchen. 70 Illustration from The Poisonous Mushroom, Julius Streicher, Berlin, 1938. Author’s collection. 71 Household Brigade, 2014. Photo by Tim Graham/ Getty Images. 72 Laurel and Hardy, ca. 1940. Michael Ochs Archives/Stringer/Getty Images. 73 René Magritte, The Son of Man, 1964, poster. Bridgeman Art Library. 74 Malcolm McDowell as Alex in A Clockwork Orange, 1971. Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images. 75 Bergère hat, ca. 1700, United States. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, USA, Museum Purchase. 76 Bergère hat, ca. 1700. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 77 Bergère hat, ca. 1710. Courtesy of Meg Andrews. 78 Joseph Highmore, Peg Woffington, ca. 1730. © The National Trust for Scotland. 79 Evelyn Bird, ca. 1725. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, USA, Museum Purchase. 80 Thomas Gainsborough, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, 1748. © National Gallery, London. Bought with contributions from the Pilgrim Trust, the Art Fund, Associated Television Ltd, and Mr. and Mrs. W. W. Spooner, 1960. 81 Benjamin Nebot, The Curds and Whey Seller, Cheapside, c. 1750. © Museum of London. 82 Katherine Read, Polly Jones, 1769. By kind permission of the Faringdon Collection Trust, Oxford, UK. 83 John Collet, High Life Below Stairs, 1763. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, USA, Museum Purchase. Gift of Mrs. Cora Ginsberg. 84 Elisabeth Louise Vigée le Brun, Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat, 1783. © The National Gallery, London. 85 Maud Sambourne’s going-away hat, 1898. By kind permission of the Countess Rosse, Birr Castle, Ireland. 86 Heather Firbank’s hat by Henry, 1909. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 87 Stephen Jones, R.H.S. Hat, 2005. By kind permission of Peter Ashworth, London.

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Chapter 6

Chapter opener Faye Dunaway, Bonnie and Clyde, 1967. Author’s collection. 88 King Louis XIV in ball dress, 1660, engraving, France, seventeenth century. Getty Images. Bibliothèque des Arts Decoratifs. Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images. 89 Inigo Jones, masque headdress, ca. 1610. © Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees. 90 The Empress of Morocco, The Duke’s Theatre, c. 1673. Author’s collection. 91 The Rival Richards, ca. 1814. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 92 Francis Hayman, ‘Falstaff’, Plays of Shakespeare, Hanmer Edition, 1744.Author’s collection. 93 Lady Wishfort, Bell’s British Theatre, 1776. Author’s collection. 94 Busiris and Douglas, Bell’s British Theatre, 1777 and 1792. Author’s collection. 95 Thomas Gainsborough, Mrs. Siddons, 1785. © The National Gallery, London. 96 Thomas Beach, Mrs. Siddons in Macbeth, 1786. Photo by The Print Collector/Getty Images. 97 Figurine of Philip Kemble as Hamlet, ca. 1800. © Victoria and Albert Museum. 98 Edmund Kean as Richard III, 1821. Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images. 99 George Cruickshank, Tom and Jerry at Covent Garden Carnival Ball, 1821. Author’s collection. 100 Behind the Scenes at Astley’s, ca. 1840. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 101 W. C. Fields, 1940. Photo by Ullstein Bild via Getty Images. 102 Charlie Chaplin, ca. 1920. Author’s collection. 103 Lily Elsie, 1907. Author’s collection. 104 Irene Bordoni in the musical comedy Paris, 1928. Author’s collection. 105 Aunt Diana in the chorus line, 1927. Author’s collection. 106 Marlene Dietrich, ca. 1935. Author’s collection. 107 Vivien Leigh, Gone With the Wind, 1939. Author’s collection. 108 Audrey Hepburn, My Fair Lady, 1964. Courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library. Credit: Warner Bros/RGA/Ronald Grant Archive/Mary Evans. 109 Faye Dunaway, Bonnie and Clyde, 1967. Author’s collection.

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Chapter 7

Chapter opener Sir Francis Grant, John Whyte Melville, 1883, Edinburgh. Photo by Fine Art Images/ Heritage Images/Getty Images. 110 Prince of Wales in a golf cap, ca. 1920. Photo by Sean Sexton/Getty Images. 111 Godfrey Kneller, Lady Cavendish, 1715. Bridgeman Art Library, UK. 112 Thomas Hudson, Portrait of a Young Woman of the Fortescue Family of Devon, 1745. © Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Paul Mellon Collection, USA. 113 Joshua Reynolds, Lady Worsley 1779. Reproduced by the kind permission of the Executors of the 7th Earl of Harewood and the Trustees of the Harewood House Estate, UK. 114 Riding Habit, La Belle Assemblée, 1812. Courtesy of Candice Hern. 115 Mr. Sponge, John Leech, Jorrocks Jaunts & Jollities, Robert Surtees London, 1838. Author’s collection. 116 ‘Model Fast Lady’, H.G. Hine (artist), Model Women and Children, Horace Mayhew, London, 1848. Author’s collection. 117 Hunting ladies, USA, c. 1890 and 1955. Author’s Collection. 118 Hunting postcards, ca. 1890 and 1905, United Kingdom. Author’s collection. 119 William Frith, The Fair Toxophilites, 1872. Courtesy of Royal Albert Museum, Exeter, UK/ Bridgeman. 120 Lords and Gentlemen of Surrey and Kent Playing Cricket at Knole Park, 1775. Photo by Culture Club/ Getty Images. 121 Captain Joe Guy and the England Cricket Eleven, 1847. Photo by The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images. 122 W. G. Grace, ca. 1900. Author’s collection. Illustration by Lance Thackeray. 123 ‘The Original Ladies’ Cricket Match’, Illustrated London News, 1890. Mary Evans Picture Library © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans. 124 Ladies’ hockey match, Illustrated London News, 1893. Mary Evans Picture Library © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans. 125 ‘A Critical Moment’, Charles Dana Gibson, The Education of Mr. Pip, 1899, New York: Dover Publications, 1969. Dover Publications, out of copyright. 126 Sir Francis Grant, John Whyte Melville, 1883, Edinburgh. Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images. 127 Massachusetts baseball team, 1909, United States. Author’s collection. 128 Three baseball players, ca. 1940, United States. Author’s collection.

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129 George du Maurier, ‘Tennis Match’, ca. 1880, London. Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images. 130 Tennis foursome, 1930. Photo by SSPL/Getty Images. 131 Henley Regatta, 1900, United Kingdom. John Hannavy Picture Collection. 132 George Morland, A Party Angling, 1788. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Paul Mellon Collection. 133 ‘Pleasant Reflections (Anglers)’, ca. 1890, United States. Author’s collection. 134 Skaters in Central Park, 1885. Photo by PhotoQuest/Getty Images. 135 Skier in a ‘jelly-bag’ cap, ca. 1900, United States. Author’s collection. 136 New women on bicycles, 1890, United Kingdom. Mary Evans Picture Library © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans. 137 ‘Cycling Couple’, comic postcard, 1910, United Kingdom. Author’s collection. 138 Great uncle Algy on his motorbike, ca. 1904, United Kingdom. Author’s collection. 139 Motorists, 1909, France. Author’s collection.

Chapter 8

Chapter opener Elsa Schiaparelli, ‘Shoe’ hat, Paris, 1938. Photo by Ullstein Bild/Ullstein Bild via Getty Images. 140 ‘The Triumph of Liberty’ headdress, 1780, France. Photo by Photo12/UIG via Getty Images. 141 Elisabeth Vigée LeBrun, Marie Antoinette, 1787. Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images. 142 Hats from The Monthly Museum, 1804, 1809, London. Author’s collection. 143 French bonnet, ca.1830. Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images. 144 Bonnet, in the illustration ‘Farewell (The Adieu)’ from Heath’s Book of Beauty, ca. 1830–1840. Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images. 145 Top hat and poke bonnet, France, 1838. Author’s collection. 146 ‘The Fast-Smoking Girl of the Period’, 1869, London. Author’s collection. 147 Frank Wright Bourdillon, The Jubilee Hat, 1888. Private collection, on loan to Penlee House Gallery and Museum, Penzance, UK. 148 ‘3-Storeys-and-a-Basement’ hat, ca. 1886. Metropolitan Museum of Art (open access image), gift of Katherine Beer and the Misses Dorcas, 1941. 149 Madame Heitz Boyer, woman’s bonnet, ca. 1880. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift f Mrs. John Townsend Smith (M.86.413.57). Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA. 150 ‘The Latest Fashion’, ca. 1890, United Kingdom. Author’s collection. 151 Woman’s hat, Louise and Company, 1900, United States. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Costume Council Fund (M.83.203.36). Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA.

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152 Suffragette postcard, 1890s, United Kingdom. Author’s collection. 153 Boater advertisement, ‘The Gentlewoman’, 1908. Author’s collection. 154 Queen Mary’s toque, Vu á la Mode, 1933, France. Author’s collection. 155 Caroline Reboux, woman’s hat, ca. 1900–1920. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. Lucile L. Whipple (48.30.5). Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA 156 Copenhagen tram, 1907. Author’s collection. 157 Little girls in hats, 1911. Author’s collection. 158 Adler adveristment, ‘Cloche and Car’, 1925. Photo by Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images. 159 John Lavery, The Artist’s Studio, 1910. © National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. 160 Lilly Daché, woman’s turban, New York, 1941. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Patrice Glick (AC1995.205.1). Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA 161 Turbans, Paris, 1944. Photo by Fred Ramage/Getty Images. 162 Elsa Schiaparelli, ‘Shoe’ hat, Paris, 1938. Photo by Ullstein Bild/Ullstein Bild via Getty Images. 163 Dior, Pagoda hat, Paris, 1947. Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images. 164 Lilly Daché, woman’s cocktail hat, ca. 1938, United States. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. Homer Burnaby (M.66.39.3). Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA 165 Hat advertisement, London, ca. 1940. Author’s collection. 166 Jane Fonda wearing a headscarf during filming of A Walk on the Wild Side, Malibu, June 1961. Photo by Willy Rizzo/Paris Match via Getty Images. 167 Floppy hat, ca. 1975. Photo by PYMCA/UIG via Getty Images. 168 Saucer hats, 1979. Photo by Fairfax Media/Fairfax Media via Getty Images. 169 Princess Diana in Philip Somerville hat, 1992. Photo by Anwar Hussein/WireImage. 170 Philip Treacy and Isabella Blow, 2003. Photo by Dave Benett/Getty Images.

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index

A

Bardot, Brigitte, 244

Addison, Joseph, 75, 180, 184

Barthes, Roland, 217

advertisement, 228

Affiliations. See also

Baseball caps, 10, 54, 96, 177,

panamas and, 104–105, 107

Occupations occupation and, 65, 92–93

189, 194–196, 198, 203, 205

Boaters

straw, 45, 83, 104–105, 107, 163, 189, 198, 238

school hats, 66–67, 69–71

Battle hats, 55–59, 61

Alexandra (Princess), 43–45, 48,

Beach, Thomas, 158

bonnet rouge, 61

Beaver hat, 15, 17, 32

French, 217, 222

Alexius, Mother Mary, 70

Beckett, Samuel, 131

hallelujah, 54–55

Ambulance World and Nursing

Bell, Quentin, 210

hats or, 114–115

Bennett, Arnold, 26, 105,

mourning, 113–114

228, 230

(anon.), 72 American Fur Company, 17

107, 222

Bonnets

straw, 14, 114, 216, 221

Andrews, Julie, 173

Berets, subversive, 174–175

Tuscan, 23

Anglican clergy, 51–54

Berg, Maxine, 211–212

wedding, 114

Anglican shovel hat, 52–54

Bergère hats, 133, 134, 135

wing, 77, 78

Angling, 199–200

cartwheels, 145–147

Booth, Junius, 154

Anthony, Susan B., 204

countess, milkmaid and

Bordoni, Irene, 168–169

Antoinette, Marie, 11, 13, 40,

minx, 139, 141

Boston Red Stockings, 194

141–143, 157, 200, 209,

country life, 121

Bourdieu, Pierre, 107

215, 231, 248

development and decline,

Bowes-Lyon, Elizabeth, 46

Archery, 180, 187, 197, 200

141–142

Bowlers, 122–123

Arlen, Michael, 63

Dolly Varden, 143–144, 221

businessmen, 121–122

Arnold, Thomas, 67

Revolution and, 142–143

Chaplin’s, 11, 149, 163, 175

shepherdesses, 135, 137–139

disguise, 131

Arnolfini, Giovanni, 210

Bernstein, Harry, 18, 55

entertainment, 163–164

173–175

Bertin, Rose, 11, 13, 40, 142, 147,

Japanese boy, 127

Ashford, Daisy, 38, 198

157, 200, 209–210,

Ascot hat, 35, 116–118, 147,

Aslet, Clive, 96 Astor, John Jacob, 17 Austen, Jane, 211, 216, 234

215, 230 Bicornes, 21, 39, 57–58, 61–62, 85, 93 Bird, Evelyn, 137

B

Black, Prudence, 90, 92–93

Bagehot, Walter, 47

Bloomer, Amelia, 224

Bakers, 81, 83

Blow, Isabella, 248–249

Ballin, Ada, 204

Bluecoat schools, 66–67, 81

link to ‘wild Mohock pranks’, 132–133 nationalisms and war, 126–128 somebody or nobody, 123–126 stage and screen, 128–129, 131 Breward, Christopher, 107

279

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inde x

Bronté, Charlotte, 53, 224

Cock, William, 123

Brummell, Beau, 35

cocked hats, 21

Burgess, Anthony, 132

Cockton, Henry, 101

Daniel Deronda (Eliot), 187

Burlesque, 161–162

Coke, Thomas, 122, 178

Danish Airlines, male crew, 88

Burney, Fanny, 27, 62, 217

Colclough, Jean, 73

David, Jacques-Louis, 61–62

Butchers, 81, 83

Collet, John, 142

Davidson, Harold, 79

Colley, Linda, 38

Davies, Marion, 234

C

Comedy, fashion and, 155

Davies, Thomas, 21

Carême, Antoine, 81

Comics, conjurers and, 162–163

Dearmer, Percy, 54

Carpenters, 83–84

Conformateur, 34

De Courcy, Anne, 67, 239

Carroll, Lewis, 19

Congreve, William, 155

Defoe, Daniel, 234

Carrotting, 19

Conjurers and comics, 162–163

Degas, Edgar, 29, 30, 125

Carter, Michael, 14, 124

Constable-Maxwell, Lyn, 71

Delacroix, Eugène, 60, 61, 62

Cartwheels, 145–147

Construction workers, hard

Depp, Johnny, 175

Catholic Church, 49

hats, 84–85

Derby hat, 116, 123, 127, 163

Catwalk stage, 164–166

Cooper, Diana, 173

Diamond Jubilee of 2012, 47

Chanel, Coco, 186, 210, 231,

Cooper, Gary, 170

Diana, Princess, 47,

238–239

Courier, Jim, 196, 198

Chapellerie May, France, 33–34

Cranston, Kate, 79

Chaplin, Charlie, 11, 108, 128,

Cranston, Stuart, 79

149, 163–165,

Cricket, 67, 69, 178, 189–190,

169–170, 175

194, 197–198, 205

New York and, 233–234 turban, 234, 236–238

245–246, 247 Diana (Lady) Spencer, 173, 245–246, 248 Diary of a Nobody (Grossmith), 22, 26, 125

Charles II (King), 38–39, 51, 152

Crompton, Richmal, 69

Charlotte (Queen), 41, 44

Croquet, 189–192, 197, 200

Chefs, 81–83

Cruikshank, George, 159, 161

Christ’s Hospital, 66, 67

Cumming, Valerie, 43

Chrysostom, St. John, 55

Cunnington, Phillis, 93, 105, 143

Dior, Christian, 146, 240, 241

Church, Sunday best, 112–113

Cunnington, Willett, 105,

Dolly Varden hat, 143–144, 221

Churchill, Winston, 96, 103–104, 164

143, 220 Cycling sports, 204–207

Clarissa (Richardson), 62

Dickens, Charles, 72, 84, 99, 110–112, 143, 217, 219 Dietrich, Marlene, 11, 169–170, 174–175

Dony, John, 22, 25, 222 Doré, Gustav, 84 Doyle, Richard, 101

Clark, Fiona, 228

D

Dreiser, Theodore, 126, 198

Cloche, 63, 145, 203, 230–231,

Daché, Lilly, 13, 28, 170, 236, 240

Dressed to Rule (Mansel), 40

233, 234, 236

cocktail hat, 242

Dress of the People (Styles), 75

280

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Du Maurier, George, 151, 196–197

Kemble and Edmund Kean, 157, 159

Eugénie, Empress, 13, 230, 234 Excellent Women (Pym), 54

Dunaway, Faye, 174–175

last big hats, 173–174

Du Plessix, Tatiana, 28, 239, 243

Marlene’s hats, 169–170

F

Du Plessix Grey, Francine, 244

Merry Widow, 166–168

Factory Acts of 1867, 25

movies, 169–170

Fashion, comedy and, 155

musicals and Hollywood,

Fashion hats, 209, 210

E Eden, Anthony, 103

168–169

Edgeworth, Maria, 139, 215, 217

subversive berets, 174–175

Edmonds, Wendy, 7, 27, 28

theatre and feathers,

Edwardes, George, 166 Edward VII (King), 43, 81, 103, 107 Edward VIII (King), 45–46

151–152

hats and feathers, 224–226 inventive 1940s, 239–240

161–162

Eliot, George, 23, 53, 84, 114,

Etiquette and class, 95–97

240, 244

245–246, 248 hair and headgear, 220–221

vaudeville and burlesque,

Erikson, Amy, 28, 211

Elizabeth (Queen), 46, 47, 59,

Diana and after,

tragic plumes, 156–157

Eisenhower, Dwight, 103, 242

187, 217, 219

Chanel, 238–239

angles, 100 boaters and panamas, 104–105, 107

Lilly Daché and New York, 233–234 Lucile, Reboux and the cloche, 230–231, 233 maiden modesty, 219–220 Paris hat, 215–217

Elsie, Lily, 11, 166, 167, 173

condition, 99

Paris hat revolution, 212, 215

Engels, Friederich, 18

hat honour, 107–111

romantic extravagance,

Entertaining hats, 149, 151

hats or bonnets, 114–115

217, 219

bowlers, 163–164

for ladies, 111–112

shopping, 210–212

catwalk stage, 164–166

mourning, 113–114

towards crisis, 240, 242–243

conjurers and comics,

old or new, 100–102

tra-la-la or ‘proper’ hats,

162–163 early public theatre, 152, 154 exit symbolic hats, 159–160

place and occasion, 115–116 political homburg, 102–104 racecourse, 116–118

fashion and comedy, 155

Sunday best, 112–113

Gaiety Girls, 166

survival, 118

headgear conventions, 154

top hats, 97–99

Hollywood and history,

weddings, 114

170–171

Eton, 67, 68, 69, 116

248–249 transitional scarf, 243–245 turban, Daché and Madame Paulette, 234, 236–238 veils and trimming, 221–222, 224 widening choices, 226, 228, 230 Fashion icons, 43–45

281

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inde x

Feathers, hats and, 224–226

Garbo, Greta, 233

H

Fedora hat, 8, 21, 55, 102, 104,

George I (King), 75

Hairstyles, 72, 79

106, 107, 117, 194, 248

George III (King), 39, 41, 57, 189

bergère and, 135, 141–142

Fields, W. C., 163–164

George IV (King), 40, 42, 57

fashion, 76, 215, 217,

Firbank, Heather, 145–147, 233

George V (King), 44, 45

Firemen, 86, 87

George VI (King), 46, 48

First World War, 32

Gibson, Charles Dana,

Fitzgibbon, Theodora, 239

191–192, 193

244, 248 hair and headgear, 220–221 sporting hats, 182–183 Halbort, Gertie, 19

Flight attendants, 88, 89–92

Gibson Girls, 191, 194, 228

Hallelujah bonnet, 54–55

The Flight Attendant’s Shoe

Gibus, M., 98

Happy Families (card game), 83

Gibus hat, 34, 98, 107, 116

Hard hats, construction

(Black), 90 Fonda, Jane, 244, 245

Gissing, George, 28, 98

Forbes, Norman, 52

Golf, 45, 118, 178–179, 189,

Hardy, Oliver, 128–129, 131, 133

Formby, George, 131

192–194, 205

Hardy, Thomas, 77, 112–115, 143

Forsyte Saga (Galsworthy), 95, 97, 102–103, 112, 117–118, 145, 231

Gone With the Wind (film), 171, 173 Goodwood, 116

workers, 84–85

Harlow, Jean, 234 Harrison, Michael, 38 Harrow

Fox, George, 51

Gordon, Lady Duff. See ‘Lucile’

Frame, Ronald, 71, 173

Grable, Betty, 234

Framley Parsonage (Trollope), 54

Grace, W. G., 190, 191

Hartnell, Norman, 46

Frederick I (King), 189

Graham, Harry, 117

Harvey, Fred, 79

Frederics, John, 171

Grant, Francis, 192, 193

Harvey Girls, 79

French, Beatrice, 28

Great Expectations (Dickens),

Hatfield, Penny, 67

French bonnet, 217, 222

110–111

match, 102, 116, 189 straw hats, 67, 69

Hat-practice, 10–11

Frith, William, 116, 188, 189

Greenaway, Kate, 70

Hats, 8–11. See also Bergère

Fry, Roger, 95, 96

Greene, Robert, 152

hats; Bowlers;

Furs, 15, 19, 59

The Green Hat (Arlen), 63

Entertaining hats;

Greer, Howard, 169

Etiquette and class;

G

Griffith, D. W., 170

Fashion hats; Sporting

Gaiety Girls, 166

Grossmith, George,

hats

Gainsborough, Thomas, 138, 144, 157, 180, 225 Galsworthy, John, 95, 96, 99, 102, 107

22, 125

or bonnets, 114–115

Grossmith, Weedon, 125

and feathers, 224–226

Gundred, Mother Mary, 70

felting process, 17–22

Guy, Joe, 189, 190

honour, 107–111

282

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inde x

industry and premises, 23–25

Hepburn, Katherine, 198

Jones, Inigo, 151–152

Hervey, Frederick, 52

Jones, Stephen, 7, 8, 13, 14, 30,

mechanization, 26–27

Hetherington, John, 21

milliners, 27–28

Hex, Shirley, 7, 27–28, 48

Jury, Barbara, 73

prices, 16

Highmore, Joseph, 75, 77,

Just William (Crompton), 69

147, 245, 248–249

topper, 32–35

137, 139

zenith, 28, 30

Hockey, 189–190, 192

K

Hogarth, William, 75, 76

Kastner, Erich, 127

Hollander, Anne, 7, 102, 149,

Kean, Edmund, 154, 157,

Hats and power Anglican clergy, 51–54 battle hats, 55–59, 61 daily life of royals, 45–48

159, 160

164, 220 Hollywood

Kelly, Grace, 244

dissenting hats, 61–63

history and, 170–171

Kemble, Philip, 157, 159

fashion icons, 43–45

musicals and, 168–169

Kennedy, Jacqueline, 59

hallelujah bonnet, 54–55

Homburg hat, 21, 43–44, 97,

Jewish headgear, 54–55

Kennedy, John F., 103–104, 117, 243

102–104, 126, 230

royal men, 38–40

Honour, hat, 107–111

The Keystone Cops (film), 86

royal women, 40–41, 43

Household Brigade, 128, 129

Keystone Kops, 173

sacred hats, 48–49

Household Cavalry, 56, 58

Kneller, Godfrey, 180, 181

uneasy heads, 38

Hudson, Thomas, 180, 181

Kossuth, Lajos (Kossuth hat), 62

Hudson Bay Company, 15

Kubrick, Stanley, 91, 132–133

Hunting hats, 178, 180, 183,

Kundera, Milan, 123, 128

Hatters, 8, 46, 100, 122, 152 bowlers, 125 mercury salts, 19

185–187, 189

milliners, 27–28

Hunting postcards, 186, 187

Ladies, etiquette for, 111–112

planking workshop, 20 top hats, 30, 32–33

L

I

Lamarr, Hedy, 236

Ice sports, 198–203

Lamb, Charles, 67

67, 99, 105, 123–125, 132,

Impressionism, 30

Landis, Deborah, 173, 175

135, 137, 145, 163

Iskin, Ruth, 30

Lane, Steve, 38, 45, 48

The Hatter’s Gazette (journal),

Laurain, Antoine, 8, 11

Hayman, Francis, 139, 154, 155 Headscarf, 243–245

J

Laurel, Stan, 128–129, 131, 133

Hearst, Randolph, 234

James, Henry, 109–110,

Lautrec, Toulouse, 115

Henderson, Debbie, 104 Hepburn, Audrey, 172, 173, 175, 205, 244

114–116, 224

Lavery, John, 234, 235

Jenkins, Elizabeth, 14, 240

Lawrence, D. H., 127, 231

Jewish headgear, 54–55

Lawrence, Gertrude, 234

283

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Lawrence, T. E., 206

M

Lawrence, Thomas, 40, 41

McDermott, Rosa, 184

Milliners, London and Paris, 27–28

Leaky, Joshua, 56

McDowell, Malcolm, 132

The Mill on the Floss (Eliot), 217

Le Brun, Elisabeth Louise

Mackintosh, Charles Rennie, 79

Miranda, Carmen, 236

Maeder, Edward, 170, 174

‘Mistake’ hat, 215–216

Lee, Gypsy Rose, 234

Magritte, René, 130, 131

Mitterand, François, 8, 11

Leech, John, 183, 184

Maidservants, 75–78

Mobcaps, 75–76, 215

Leghorn hats, 11, 23, 133, 135,

Vigée, 144, 214, 215

Main, Veronica, 23

Molesworth (Searle), 69

137, 139, 141,

Majer, Michelle, 165

Moody, Helen Willis, 198

143–145, 200

Mansel (Philip), 40

Moore, George, 63, 116, 123

Leigh, Vivien, 171

Marcella (Ward), 72, 74

Moran, Gussy, 197

Lely, Sir Peter, 137

Marriage Act of 1753, 114

Morgan, Michelle, 174

Lenglen, Suzanne, 198

Mary (Queen), 44, 59, 228,

Morland, George, 200

Liberty Leading the People

229, 230

Motoring sports, 204–207

(Delacroix painting),

Mary Queen of Scots, 194

Mourning, 113–114

60, 61

Massachusetts baseball team,

Movies, 169–170

Linton, Eliza Lynn, 144, 221

194, 195

Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 14

Lipovetsky, Gilles, 104, 210, 212

Mauriac, François, 231

Musicals, Hollywood and,

Llewellyn, Tom, 28

Mayhew, Henry, 101

Lloyd, Robert, 16, 100

Mayhew, Horace, 184

Lock & Co., 34–35

Mayo, Janet, 49

N

Lock, George James, 35

Melville, John Whyte, 192–193

Nannies, 71–74

Lock bowler, 122

Mercury poisoning, 19, 32

Napoleon, 48, 57–58, 149

Loeb, Mortimer, 103

Merry Widow hat, 11, 149,

Napoleonic Wars, 21, 23, 143

168–169

Loos, Alfred, 103

166–168, 173, 175, 226,

Napoleon III, 107

Lord’s Day, Sunday best,

230, 233

Nationalism, 126–128

112–113 Louis XIV (King), 150, 151 ‘Lucile’, 13, 166–168, 170, 230–231, 233

Merry Widow (musical), 149, 166 Messel, Leonard, 145 Middlemarch (Eliot), 23, 114

Nebot, Benjamin, 138, 139 New York Knickerbockers, 194 Nicholas Nickleby (Dickens), 217, 219

Lurie, Alison, 65

Military hats, 55–59, 61

Nightingale, Florence, 72

Luton, straw hats, 22–25

Milkmaids, 75–78

Norland nanny, 74

Lyons, John, 79

Miller, Marilyn, 169

Nurses, 71–74

284

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inde x

O

revolution, 212, 215

Raeburn, Henry, 200

Occasion for hats, 115–116

veils and trimming,

Ravenat, Gwen, 112, 228

221–222, 224

Occupations affiliations and,

Patricia of Connaught

porters, 83–84 chefs, bakers and butchers, 81–83

Reboux, Caroline, 13, 230–231, 233–234

(Princess), 44

65, 92–93 carpenters and coal and fish

Read, Katherine, 140

Paulette, Madame, 234, 236–238

Redback Spider, 92

Peel, Robert, 85

Reynolds, Joshua, 141, 157, 182

Peel-Swynnerton, Matthew, 105

Ribeiro, Aileen, 75, 138–139, 156–157, 212, 215

Penelope’s Hat (Frame), 71, 173

flight attendants, 89–92

Penn, Arthur, 174

Rich, E. E., 15

hard hats for construction,

Penn, William, 51

Richard III (film), 154, 159

Pepys, Samuel, 15, 22, 49

Richardson, Samuel, 62, 75,

84–85 maidservants and milkmaids, 75–78

137, 139

Peto, Tony, 249 Place for hats, 115–116

Riding hats, 27, 177–178, 180, 182, 184–185, 187, 238

nurses and nannies, 71–74

Poiret, Paul, 234, 236

policemen, firemen and

Police Act of 1856, 85

Ridley, Jane, 43

Policemen, 85–87

Robinson, Fred, 123, 125, 131

Posh, Murray, 22, 125

Rosie, Colin, 102

Postmen, 87, 89

Royal Ascot, 116, 118

Princess Casamassima (James),

Royal Jubilee, 45

postmen, 85–87, 89 waitresses, 78–79, 81 Old Wives’ Tale (Bennett), 26, 105, 222

110, 116, 224

Olivier, Laurence, 154

Royal men, hats, 38–40 Royal women, hats, 40–41, 43

Onwhyn, Thomas, 101

Public theatre, 152, 154

Orpen, William, 81, 82

Pym, Barbara, 54

P

Q

Sacred hats, 48–49

Pamela (Richardson), 75, 137,

Qantas, flight attendants, 90–91

St. Leonard’s, 70, 71

Quakers, 50, 51, 52

Sala, George, 15, 97–98

Quant, Mary, 27

Salvation Army, 55, 71

S

139, 141 Panama hat, 11, 54, 66, 104–105,

Sambourne, Maud, 145, 146

107–108, 147, 160 Papendiek, Charlotte Louise Henrietta, 41 Paris hat, 215–217 milliners, 27–28

R

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 238

Racecourse, etiquette for,

Sassoon, Vidal, 243

116–118 Rae, John, 66

Scarf, 243–245 Scenes of Clerical Life (Eliot), 53

285

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Schiaparelli, Elsa, 146, 238, 239, 240 School hats, 66–67, 69–71 Screen, bowlers, 128–129, 131

cycling and motoring, 204–207 hunting, riding and archery, 180–189

Searle, Ronald, 69

tennis, 196–198

Secretage, 19

water, ice and snow sports,

Selznick, David, 171

Surtees, Robert, 100,

198–203

183–185, 193 Swanson, Gloria, 236 Symbolic hats, exit, 159–160

T Taylor, Elizabeth, 237

Seurat, Georges, 124, 125

Stage, bowlers, 128–129, 131

Taylor, John, 192

Shaw, George Bernard, 118

Stein, Sarah, 226

Tennis, 196–198

Shepherdesses, 135,

Stetson hat, 11, 63, 74, 118, 122,

Thaarup, Aage, 13, 22, 26, 27,

137–139, 144

133, 173

Sheridan, Richard, 28

Stockport felting process, 17–22

Sherriff, R. C., 125

Stoker, Bram, 105

Shirley (Brontë), 53, 224

Straw hats, 52, 70, 75, 97, 141,

Shovel hat, 9, 52–54 Shrimpton, Jean, 117, 119, 244 Sickert, Walter, 115 Silcox, Blanche, 14, 15

173, 194, 200 bergère, 121, 133, 135, 145–147 boaters, 45, 83, 104–105, 107,

46, 115, 147, 170, 222, 239–240, 242–244 Thackeray, William, 35, 81, 101, 114, 184, 220 Thatcher, Margaret, 38, 59, 61 Theatre early public, 152, 154 feathers and, 151–152 headgear conventions, 154

Simmel, Georg, 212

163, 189, 198, 238

Sinatra, Frank, 100

bonnet, 14, 114, 216, 221

Thompson, Flora, 78, 85, 93, 210

Slouch hat, 10, 61, 62–63, 103,

Dolly Varden, 143–144

Thompson, John, 101

Harrow’s, 67, 69

Tilley, Vesta, 162

Snow sports, 198–203

Luton County, 22–25, 79

Top hats, 97–99

Somerville, Philip, 38, 246

mechanization of, 26–27

angle, 100

Sondheim, Steven, 126

shepherdess, 135, 137–139

condition, 99

233–234

Soyer, Alexis, 81

Streicher, Julius, 128

life of Colin Rosie, 102

The Spectator (Addison), 75, 180

Strutt, Joseph, 157

old or new, 100–102

Spencer, Lady Diana,

Stubbs, George, 76

245–246, 248 Sporting hats, 177–178 cricket, hockey, croquet, golf and baseball, 189–196

Styles, John, 75, 76, 113, 138–139, 141 Suffragette postcard, 228 Sunday best, 112–113

Tour Through the North of England (Young), 17 Tragedy plumes, 156–157 Treacy, Philip, 7, 13, 248, 248–249

286

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inde x

Treatise on Hats (Lloyd), 21, 31

Victoria and Albert Museum, 7,

Willis, Frederick, 32–34, 38, 67,

Tricornes, 21, 39, 58, 61, 89, 92,

135, 141

79, 81, 95, 97–98, 100,

143, 175, 180, 189

Vorontsova, Irina, 143

102–105, 109–110, 112,

Trilby hat, 21, 63, 91, 97, 205

116, 125, 212

bowler and, 126, 128

W

Wing bonnet, 77, 78

entertainment, 162, 169–170,

Waitresses, 78–79, 81

Wintour, Anna, 210

Wallop, Charlie, 100

Women in Love (Lawrence), 127,

174–175 etiquette, 102, 104, 117

Walpole, Horace, 41

fashion, 228, 245–246, 248

The Wanderer (Burney), 27, 62

Woolf, Virginia, 14, 30, 59

named for character Trilby

War, 126–128

Worth, Charles, 230

O’Ferrall, 151 ‘Triumph of Liberty’ headdress, 212, 213 Trollope, Anthony, 53–54, 83, 144, 178, 222

231, 233

Ward, Emily, 74 Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 72, 74

Y

Water sports, 198–203

Young, Arthur, 17, 22

Webb, Charlie, 32

The Young Visiters (Ashford), 38, 198

Weddings, 114

Truman, Harry, 103

Wellington, Duke of, 58

Turban bicyclette, 237

Wells, H. G., 99–100, 107, 205

Z

Turbans, 234, 236–238

Wharton, Edith, 30, 144

Zappa, Frank, 133

Whipple, Dorothy, 99

Zoffany, Johan, 85, 182

V

Whitbourn, Frank, 35

Zola, Emile, 30

van Runkle, Theadora, 174

Wild Mohock pranks, bowlers

Vaudeville, 161–162

and, 132–133

287

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hats

288

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