Last night, instead of sleeping, I was thinking about hats.
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Last night, instead of sleeping, I was thinking about hats. The start of the 1900s, the decade not the century, is one of those hat eras where pretty much anything goes and I'm sure I have the dregs of some hatting supplies in a box on the shelf... I know for sure I have modern buckram and hat wire! And while I absolutely do not need another hat, I do quite like making them. I mean, it's horrible and difficult, but also fun? Just hat dreams
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Me, a day later, just trying to focus on a crafting video so I can settle my brain wrinkles before bed: Tulle netting is kind of cool. It's too bad it's really difficult to find the veil netting you'd use on hats. With all the embellishments like dots, sequins, beads, knots.
My goblin brain: Bet you could do some bead embroidery on lace or tulle netting, and have a sparkly veil to put on a hat...
Me: Oh for fuck's sake -
Leafing through a dozen different old #Millinery manuals from the 1890s and the 1910s (and one from 1901) and they had all kinds of things to say. Paraphrased:
"It's interesting how a machine sewer in New York gets paid so much more than a woman doing the plaiting by hand in distant China."
"Make a little knot just behind the needle when sewing with doubled up thread, to prevent twisting."
"The selection of ready made hat bases is vast, but it would do to know how to do this yourself, anyway." -
The last thing is a really good thing because the author then went on to describe how you make and cover a wire hat base. I knew wire hat bases existed because I'm like that, but I didn't know they were so common? (Probably because it's hard to tell when a hat is wire and not buckram, because both are covered by fabric.) Anyway, what an accessible option for a historical costumer of today, metal wire is a lot easier to source than buckram...
Also while things went in and out of fashion, there were just so very many different ways to make a hat. And the hat bases, in every shape imaginable!
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I was reading in bed so now I'll have to go through my bookmarks like "now which fucking book had this in it that I didn't stop to fully read" and make note of them, but yeah.
Also there was a full section about why egret plumes were especially bad: Apparently the extremely attractive and swish tuft people loved to put on hats only appears on the egret female when she's hatching chicks, and because the dropped ones are not as nice, hunters would go around killing the birds, or just ripping them out(!) and leaving the mother and hatchlings to die. Jesus fuck!
I mean. Good that you wrote about it, but bad that it happened! -
The Wikipedia article for aigrette is really really short and has nothing about the historical bird murder. If I dig up the paragraph, does a Victorian book work as a citation? Does anyone want to mention that on there? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aigrette
(For reasons of avoiding being lost in eleven thousand rabbit holes I am not allowing myself to edit wikipedia pages.)
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And this is the page: https://archive.org/details/cu31924003649534/page/n119/mode/1up?view=theater
From the book "Millinery" by Charlotte Rankin Aiken, B.A.
(Former Educational Director, Lasalle and Koch, Toledo, Ohio). Published in 1918. -
@sinituulia Oooh, thanks for this link! Now, digging in my brain, there was an episode of the podcast “Dressed: The History Of Fashion” way back in May 2018 called “Murderous Millinery” about … yep.
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@caity They killed so many birds for hats, I'd read a bit about the Audubon Society and its history, but the aigrette bit was news to me.
There was also a mention in the book like: "Ostrich feathers are carefully pulled from the bird so as not to hinder the growing in of another one." And like. How the fuck do you carefully pull anything from an *ostrich*
And apparently you could get 300 plumes from an ostrich during its lifetime. Poor birds. Sure they drop them, too, but less nice to sell! -
@sinituulia Emu feathers are still part of Australian Military Uniforms for some regiments! And no way would I want to try and pull feathers from an emu!
I had a friend who was a milliner who used to specialise in feathered hats and oooffff, even just “Coq” feathers took a ridiculous amount of prep (and they’re really just plain old chook feather or geese or something) but she used to do these hats that were several thousand hand stitch feathers per hat. Amazing hats, but…
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@caity Yeah, one of these had the entire rigmarole for preparing even just one feather, plume or spray of them. A lot of the time it advocated using benzene, ammonia and such. Meanwhile, didn't much go into detail about what to do to an entire bird... Presumable they'd just buy them from taxidermists or something. Relatedly: An entire bird on a hat.
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@sinituulia @caity I have to admit that if there was a way to have a bird-looking thing that a) wasn't plastic b) didn't involve killing birds c) was cheap, I would have a hat with a bird on it, or at the very least a plan to make one :D -
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@sinituulia @caity /me adds to the list :D
