4 Unit 4 Supplementary Material

Texts about Fashion

Тext a

Hats

Each of the Season's sporting occasions demands specific headwear. For men, the top hat is de rigueur al Ascot, while panamas and boaters dominate at the Henley Regatta. Some prefer the panama because of its light, easy-to-wear soft structure. Originally made in Equador from Torquilla straw, the panama comes in two styles: ridged, which can be conveniently rolled up, or with a wide brim in an elegant trilby style? British hut firms in Luton and Christy's in Cheshire are famous for the top-quality panamas which are sold to the finest British hat shops and men's outfitters.

Although wartime shortages resulted in the standardization of clothing design, hats remained both unrationed and unrestricted, thus permitting women to make a small lashion statement. However, for reasons of practicality and safety many women wore snoods, scarves and turbans. For the limited number of special events small lilted luits adorned with fabric Mowers were popular, like Alice Camus's elegant black straw design decorated with pretty artificial flowers.

Pillboxes with veils, miniature hats and neatly twisted turbans enabled fashionable long hair to be pinned and shown off to full advantage. "These small hats were often worn lipped at an angle of 15 degrees and fastened with a small chin-strap. Veiling was anoth­er way to keep long hair neat. The V&A's miniature brown felt hat decorated with bird of paradise leathers illustrates this popular style. It was fashionable at this time to incorporate a small comb to replace hat pins. Costs of materials, however, began to prove prohibitive, with an increase of up to 400 per cent according to a wartime survey. As supplies of trimmings, decorative motifs and materials dwindled, it became necessary to make hats from only tiny pieces of fabric.

Text b Hats in the 1940s

During the war Winston Churchill's wearing of a square-crowned 'coke' hat provided an alternative to the conventional bowler. This distinctive hat became central to his sar­torial identity. Plate 106 shows a classic version dating from the mid- 1940s, bought Iroin James Lock & Co., the world-famous hat shop for gentlemen.

By the mid-1940s long-established traditions of hat-wearing were beginning to lie eroded. In response to the threat to their livelihoods. British milliners and hatters staged a promotional campaign to get men to wear hats. Coining the oil-repeated slogan, 'del a hat to get ahead', the campaign was featured in British Millinery in October 1948. As the magazine, explained, it was aimed at men aged 18 lo 35 years and would appeal to them on two main grounds - the desire to look well before their girlfriends, and the desire to get on in business.

The design of men's headgear was predictably conservative in the post-war years, with the soft felt trilby (a generic term for a man's brimmed hat) being customary everyday wear. Available in a range of brim sizes, it could be worn at varying angles and sometimes featured a crease down the front of the crown. By the mid- 1950s attempts were made to widen the market through design differentiation. A new style of trilby, with a narrow brim and a low crown, was introduced but it failed to attract many wearers. Bowler Hat Week was launched in October 1950 to celebrate 100 years of the wearing of bowler hats. Although this event was not an outstanding success, the bowler hat did make some­thing of a comeback among British businessmen during the 1950s and '60s.