‘IF YOU ARE going to wear a hat at all, be decisive and go the whole hat,’1 Alison Adburgham decreed. Many women have followed that maxim. Chocolate-box confections, cream puffs, galleons, outsize doilies – hats have been many things, including occasions for mirth and music-hall merriment. There are everyday hats, hats that cheer, hats for Sunday best, even hats to steal a march on friends. In Lettice Cooper’s novel The New House (1936) Evelyn is advised by her mother, who has learned a thing or two about keeping up appearances on limited means, that she should ‘have a new winter hat at the very beginning of the autumn, and a new summer hat very early in the spring’.2 That way, friends noticed your new hat while they were still wearing their old ones.
Hats like soup plates were all the rage when my grandma was a young woman. Not only were their circumferences large, their decoration knew no bounds: flowers, fruit, shells – sometimes all at once – plus plumage so extravagant it threatened British birds. The Edwardian taste for things feathered led to the creation in 1904 of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds to curb millinery excess. A hat Annie wore during this period was relatively restrained, being limited to flowers, but was a whopper nonetheless. At a wedding she attended, the female guests stood some distance apart from one another to accommodate their different headgear. Turner’s department store promised modish styles that were neither ‘extreme nor conspicuous’,3 but definitions of conspicuous change: its advertisement featured hats whose ostrich plumes stood at least eighteen inches proud of the crown.
The velvet flowers that lay on top of my grandma’s buttons when they came to me belong to the 1920s. By this time common sense reigned and hats were now more discreet. The cloche hat was in vogue and women like Annie, who could not afford to buy a new hat each year, let alone each season, decorated their own, applying new trimmings as fashion or fancy dictated. Women’s magazines offered advice on how to trim one hat six different ways; the tills of haberdashery departments rang with purchases of ribbon, braid, and flowers. Eileen Whiteing recalled that hand-made artificial flowers shaped in silk or velvet were ‘quite exquisite’4 back then. The button-box flowers, with their papery green leaf and solid stamens (now, sadly, cracked) were once bright and blooming, and are not unlike the appliqué trim decorating the Victoria & Albert Museum’s pink straw hat made by Kilpin Ltd, circa 1925. Millie Levine recalls with fondness, more than eighty years later, her first grown-up hat, a cloche circled with marigolds.
Whatever their style and function, hats were an essential part of a woman’s wardrobe well into the twentieth century. Hats conferred respectability; to go without was to be improperly dressed. (In the eighteenth century, a top London hotel refused admittance to any woman without a hat.) How to Dress Well was of the opinion that, of all items of clothing, hats performed a ‘diplomatic mission’5 by bringing an outfit together.
In the era of my grandma’s velvet flowers, cloche hats could be purchased off-the-peg in the wide variety of colours that signified modernity. Good Housekeeping’s Shopping Service offered straw hats in copper beech, poppy, cyclamen, hyacinth and jade. Green was so popular that The Green Hat even gave its name to a fashionable novel. An Irish linen cloche hat cost the interwar woman 14s 11d, but little felts or straws were nearer 6s, and a bobbed or shingled hairstyle to go beneath them 1s 6d. My great-aunt Eva bought a decidedly chic cloche hat, closer to a skull cap in shape, which gripped her head like a helmet and whose brim swept back on each side of her face; a photograph shows a well-heeled young woman wearing something similar. Mistress Fashion ruled the day and evidently hats could be as democratising as dresses. Those with means shopped at little milliners like Brighton’s La Maison Blanche which advertised ‘exquisite millinery and evening head dresses’.6 Chesterfield had Madame Lucille and Maison Meta, whose very names were a draw; in 1936, the town had twelve milliners as well as millinery departments providing a personal service within larger stores. Women fortunate enough to wear bespoke hats advertise their milliner, which is why, when Nancy Astor took her seat in Parliament, she received free hats by the dozen.
T. J. Rendell joined the staff of Liberty as an apprentice milliner in 1926. In this role she was paid the statutory rate of 1½d an hour, a token fee while training, for a forty-four-hour week. With the exception of the Workroom Head and First Hand, even fully trained milliners were only paid 7½d an hour, which amounted to approximately 30s. This ‘was insufficient to live on, since a bed-sitting room with food generally cost about that amount … [and] meant that only girls with comfortable homes or working husbands could do this kind of thing. We had a maid once who said that she would have liked to have done millinery, but owing to lack of money was obliged to go into service.’7
Millinery had long been regarded as a respectable profession for young women with artistic flair. Ms Rendell progressed from making linings for simple felts and straws to cutting out the famous silk scarves with which many of Liberty’s hats were trimmed, before progressing to the milliner’s skill of shaping hats on blocks. She decorated raffia hats with posies and individual flowers, creating the pattern as she went, and during the summer of 1928, when all things painterly were in vogue, actually painted hats. Millinery was a seasonal trade, and so during slack periods Ms Rendell made up hats for the next season and, occasionally, stitched soft toys. Margaret Broughton, a young milliner working in a provincial establishment, had the more sobering task of stitching shrouds in quiet moments.
There were few quiet moments for Marjorie Gardiner who sold hats during the 1920s, when retail workers were reliant on commission and not to sell was a cardinal sin. She enjoyed her first job in a small exclusive shop with an artistically dressed window containing the obligatory single gown, hat and vase of flowers, but her next establishment, although equally smart, and with two showrooms, a Head Milliner and four girls, was a much harsher regime. Dressed in black from head to toe, including black satin shoes, Marjorie and the other sales staff stood throughout the day – often until 9 p.m. on Saturday evenings – with the shop door open, regardless of the weather, their faces fixed in smiles – like the young worker in Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’, who must tolerate the customer who tries on every single hat before saying she will ‘call in tomorrow and decide definitely’.8 A steely-eyed madame observed Marjorie’s every move; incurring her displeasure meant instant dismissal with no reference.
It takes confidence to wear a hat well. ‘The oddest little shapes alighted like birds on [Evelyn’s] trim pale gold hair’9, but not everyone has the fictional Evelyn’s knack of finding a hat to suit her. Christian Dior advised readers of Woman’s Illustrated not to copy his models, but to try a hat several ways until they found the most becoming angle for them. Most women simply followed fashion. The lengths some went to be in the swim was captured by a cartoon in which a woman wears her feathered hat at a rakish, tipsy angle: ‘Darling! It’s perfect,’ a friend tells her. ‘You look absolutely blotto.’10
Magazines advised how the right ribbon flourish could add a note of individuality but, more often than not, uniformity triumphed. Invited to speak at the Women’s Institute, the Provincial Lady is ‘introduced to felt hat and fur coat, felt hat and blue jumper, felt hat and tweeds, and so on’11; some twenty-five years later, a Barbara Pym heroine observes that
there was a particular kind of hat worn by ladies attending Parochial Church Council meetings – a large beret of neutral-coloured felt pulled well down to one side. Both Mrs Crampton and Mrs Mayhew wore hats of this type, as did Miss Doggett, though hers was of a superior material … Indeed, there seemed to be little for the ladies to do but observe each other’s hats, for their voices were seldom heard.12
Best hats were a different matter. Whether following or disdaining fashion, women took pride in these. Picture postcards record all manner of headgear. At a time when hats were ubiquitous, some postcards may have simply recorded special occasions at which hats were worn, but others undoubtedly recorded special hats.
Though some hats were unique, hats were seldom singular: women wore a hat and gloves. How to find the right hat and gloves to complement an outfit was a mission in itself. May Smith conveyed her pride in succeeding. ‘Garbed myself in my new autumn attire – blackberry coat, black hat with petunia ribbon, petunia scarf, black gloves, shoes and handbag – and, thus attired, swaggered forth feeling like Solomon in all his glory.’13 On this occasion, as on many others, May’s new clothes received their first airing in church. Until 1942, when, with wartime shortages worsening, the Archbishop of Canterbury decreed that women’s heads need no longer be covered in church, no respectable woman attended hatless.
Post-war relaxation saw a revival of frivolity. Alison Adburgham recorded ‘A wonderful year for hats’ in 1956. ‘One rose, or roses galore … soufflés of whipped-up tulle, charlottes of frothed organza … toadstools of black net … hair-dryers … big white drums … beehives … mob-caps’.14 And that was only five months in. Nonetheless, the war had loosened the hat’s grip; women no longer felt compelled to observe the rules in quite the same way. What really finished off the hat as an insistent symbol was the 1960s, which finished off so many other symbols of conformity. Jean Shrimpton’s appearance at the Melbourne Races in 1965 wearing neither hat nor gloves was considered newsworthy and sounded the hat’s death knell. Soon, young women wore hats only when they chose – the crochet caps of the 1960s (which were not a million miles away from the cloche), broad, floppy brimmed hats or Faye Dunaway berets. More recently the special-occasion fascinator has held sway. Wearing what you like is a long way from wearing what you must.
Elsa Schiaparelli’s surrealist shoe hats raised eyebrows in 1937; today, we look in awe at some of Philip Treacy’s millinery creations: hats have always inspired the adventurous. During the 1930s, the Newcastle branch of Fenwick’s department store proudly announced The Glass Hat, ‘transparent … glinting … with a picture brim to see your eyes and curls! But wearably pliable, and stitched with a band of soft blue velvet.’15 It is hard to think who might be tempted by this creation, except, perhaps, the occupant intended for Oliver Hill’s all-glass room, seen at an exhibition of modern design in 1933, with its glass bed and glass table, standing on a glass floor. And if any woman was brave enough to step out wearing the Glass Hat, then – hats off to her.