Hats, hats, hats

Vintage Vicky asked for more hats. Or hats, really, as I haven’t really talked about them at all yet. When I was a child I always wore something one my head. Always. If no cap/hat/helmet were available other things could do like paper bags or a small buckets or my gruel bowl. Usually before I had eaten all the gruel… The red cap with fake fur I wear on the picture was a favourite.




Nowadays I still love hats, but rarely wear them. When it is cold I wrap a woolen scarf around my head, otherwise I’m bare headed. To wear hats today is a conscious decision and something that is definitely something that people react to. It is strange that in a few years (the sixties, I’m looking at you) a fashion that had been going strong through the ages, suddenly became something unusual and remarkable. In the 1940’s, though hats were very fashionable indeed. For being a decade so full of practical and hard wearing clothes, the hats often are surprisingly frivolous, but when you think about it, then there is a reason for that too. With a war going on and clothes being regulated in some way or the other, a hat is still a small object. You don’t need much to decorate a hat lavishly, so when everything else had to be practical, a frilly hat must have felt like something of a relief. It is also an easy way to dress up. Take a plain suit that you wore in the daytime with a better, change to a spiffy little hat for an outing and you look so much more elegant.



Not all hats were little silly things, of course. Berets and hats that borrowed from male fashions can also be found a lot.







Enlarge this and take a look at Miss Bacall's nails. I think pointy is the only way to describes them!



Hollywood frilly was probably a lot frillier than what was considered frilly for ordinary wear…







Hat? Hair decoration? Being eaten alive by roses?



I love these wide-breamed hats that frames the face.







I don't think she wears a bandana under the hat, but rather that the hat band.



I love the idea of using a two-pronged hair comb as hat ornament!



A hat made of fur?





Or perhaps crochet?



Writing this post made me remember that I have a forties hat safely tucked away in the attic. It's in black velvet and worn on the back of the head. I must dig it up and take some proper photographs! While I'm at it I shall have a look after the bag full of millinery s´tuff that I inherited from my grandmother, I'm sure there are a lot of goodies there that I have forgotten about. I'm also battling one of Vintage Vogue hat patterns- horrid directions, so there will be more hat posts in the future.