Holiday Gift Ideas for 1913

Gifts for 1913

Loretta reports:

Instead of a fashion plate for the 1910s (yes, we’ve come that far in the year’s survey), I’m presenting a few pages of the Ladies' Home Journal holiday gift ideas from their November 1913 issue.

I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t mind receiving some of these myself!

If you’re desperately missing the monthly fashion plate, here’s one from the December 1913 Delineator, with several more pages of fashion following.

Gifts for 1913

Gifts for 1913

From an English Magazine: A French Hat with Italian Flowers, 1775

Isabella reporting,

Fashion history often focuses on what the elite classes were wearing in cities and at court, and overlooks what more ordinary people wore. The 1770s are usually represented by the extremes of high fashion as shown in fashion plates and caricatures, with exaggerated false rumps and hoops and towering hair crowned by elaborate hats and plumes (like this and this).

Yes, there were women - usually young, fashion-conscious, and willing to spend lavishly - who embraced the absolute latest styles. But just as few women today dress in clothes straight from the runways of New York and Paris, the majority of 18thc. women preferred clothes and hats that were not so much duplicating the latest fashion, as inspired by it.

The Lady's Magazine in May, 1775, listed a number of hat styles that were popular that spring. Unlike the detailed fashion reporting from the early 19thc. magazines that Loretta shares, readers of the Lady's Magazine had to use more imagination. There aren't any colored illustrations, or detailed descriptions, but the brief listings were enough for a woman to take to her milliner, and let their combined taste create an attractive hat.

One of the new hats for undress (day wear) for May is described as a "FRENCH HAT: chip, with nothing but Italian flowers." The reproduction hat worn here by Katelyn, a summer intern in the Margaret Hunter Shop in Colonial Williamsburg, fits that description nicely A chip hat was one made of plaited straw, stitched into shape; in the mid-1770s, hats were generally flat or with a very shallow crown, with a wide, flexible brim. Ribbons tied at the nape would not only hold the hat in place over a cap, but also bend the brim into a becoming arc worn low over the eyes. (The hat, along with Katelyn's clothing, was created in the shop using 18thc. methods.)

Italian flowers were not necessarily imported from Italy, but the generic term for artificial flowers of silk or paper. Flowers might have gone in and out of fashion, but I'm sure there were some women who always wanted them on their hats simply because they're pretty.

I like to imagine a young 18thc. woman like Katelyn visiting her favorite milliner's shop and making careful, pleasurable selections of the chip hat, silk ribbons, and flowers to create her own interpretation of 1775's French Hat.

Many thanks to Sarah Woodyard for background information for this post.

Photographs ©2015 Susan Holloway Scott.

More 18th c. Hats from Colonial Williamsburg

Isabella reporting,

Since everyone enjoyed the white silk hat that milliner's apprentice Abby Cox was wearing in my last post, I'm sharing three more hats inspired by 18th c. portraits and fashion plates and recreated by the Margaret Hunter Millinery Shop in Colonial Williamsburg.

The white hat, above left, features a silk-covered straw brim trimmed with silk flowers, gathered gauze, a coyly trailing silk ornament, and red silk ribbon to tie it all up. You can see the inspiration for this hat in the 1776 print A Bagnigge Wells scene, or, No resisting temptation here.

The extravagantly striped silk hat, right, with a tall crown is similar to hats found in French fashion plates of around 1787. Built on a frame of wire and buckram, it's trimmed with white cock's feathers, but also popular were hats that featured similar plumes made from more exotic (and now considered endangered) vulture  feathers. This hat was recently worn with the appropriately full hairstyle of the era by Nicole Rudolph, who also works in the shop - see her here on the shop's Facebook page. No one said "wow" in the 18thc., but that IS the proper response.

Abby models a hat of black silk taffeta and gauze of around 1781, lower left, that's a close cousin to the white hat she was wearing in my post earlier this week. Black silk seems to have been much more popular for this style of hat than the white, perhaps because it was easier to keep fresh, or simply because it seemed more elegant. (I know it's much harder to photograph, which is why there's a second picture of it, bottom left.) As Nicole Rudolph said, the black silk hat is the Little Black Dress of late 18th c. Britain.

If you were a Georgian lady visiting the shop, which would you choose? I warn you: Abby can be very persuasive behind the counter. You might end up with all three....

Many thanks to Abby Cox!

All photographs copyright 2015 Susan Holloway Scott.