Midi Range: The 'Marlene' Top Hat

Here is another shape for my new 'midi' size- not as small as a mini hat, but just smaller than a full size hat. While it looks closer to a full size hat when worn, it perches jauntily on the head so you can also have a hairdo, and sizing is not an issue. They're one-size-fits-all, and more flattering to most of us than the minis, which can sometimes appear to be a bit too small in proportion to the face.

As you may have noticed, I generally name my blocks (and the resulting hat shape). I also sometimes name individual styles made with those blocks, for those that have particularly distinctive trim. For example, the 'Una' style (big bow in back, ruffled hat band and curly feathers with antique silk lace veiling) is made with a 'Belle Epoch' mini top hat block, but I make other styles with the same block as well.

The following hats were made using the same midi size block, which I call the 'Marlene', after Dietrich, who often rakishly wore a top hat and lady tux.

The block is modeled on a classic 1900-era top hat shape, called a D'Orsay, that had a gently belled crown and an curly brim.


The first style I'm calling 'Viola'. Here's one in lush leopard print long-napped fur felt, with a large bow and hand-curled feathers. These Ringneck Pheasant feathers are overdyed to match the felt, leaving the feathers' natural markings and iridescence still showing through.

 

And here's a 'Viola' in basic black.  It could be made in lots of colors. Have an idea for a custom color? Let me know.

 

The 'Marlene' hats have actually been in the works for a while now, but I had an especially difficult time settling on a trim, as I wanted something that would compliment the shape of the hat without obscuring it on one hand, or being too plain on the other. After weeks and weeks of fussing, inspiration for the trim finally came unexpectedly from my hat block maker...


Guy Morse Brown Hat Blocks makes spectacular blocks. I can't say enough good things about them, or about Owen Morse Brown, the current owner and head block maker there. He's an incredibly talented woodworker, and makes fine musical instruments in addition to hat blocks. He recently sent me the following amazing photos of a viol he made for one of his instrument clients.

I especially love the scrolls on some of his other work, like this one.

See more of Owen's work as a luthier here.


The 'Viola' is now available for sale in my Etsy shop.


And here's a sneak peek at the first finished sample from a line of over-the-top hats I've been dreaming up. These will definitely fall into the 'More Is More' category, and are going to include beaded and button-covered hats, rhinestone-encrusted hats, etc. I'm even planning to make a small coral reef from manipulated fabric and ribbon... Most of them will have themes.

Made from long-napped felt shaped with the 'Marlene' block, this top hat style is inspired by and named for Maman Brigitte, a New Orleans Voodoo loa.  It's draped with several feet of distressed vintage silk veiling wound around the hat and tied into a large bow on the back; the loops of the bow are supported by long antique hat pins that stick up from the back of the hat. Two hand-curled Lady Amherst Pheasant tail feathers are tucked behind the bow. On the front, it's also got hat pins that I made specially for this style, using bone skull beads and fish vertebrae, small spotted and striped feathers, and a small horsehair whip. A spray of wispy black peacock hurl feathers, and a wishbone tied with a red ribbon bow, completes the design.

New Hat Style: Yvette

Inspired by the quirky, asymmetrical 'doll' hats popular just before and during World War II, this slightly mini top hat shape is shorter on one side and taller on the other, with the brim canted at the opposite angle, and the crown tilts forward like a little Alice in Wonderland teacake about to topple over.


I made this sample in a gorgeous charcoal gray fur felt with black and gray ribbon trim.


Dressed up with peacock sword feathers, dyed to match the felt and curled into spirals.


I've been collecting vintage hats for almost 25 years and my all-time favorite was made by a Parisian Milliner named Yvette Delort: a little late-1930s 'doll' top hat that is asymmetrical, has a ruched silk lining and a silk plush exterior (rare for the period), and is entirely hand-sewn. This hat has seen better days, is a bit squashed and rubbed around the edges, but it's my Velveteen Rabbit of hats: a little pal, my millinery mascot, bursting with personality. If my house was burning down, it's one of maybe 10 things I would try to grab on my way out the door. The more I learn about hat making and the more I look at this hat, the details and fine workmanship that went into it, the more I'm convinced that the person who designed it was a genius.

Here's a photo of the lovely young Mlle. Delort looking gorgeous wearing one of her own creations, circa 1931.


Yvette Delort opened her shop in Paris in 1930, and there are a handful of references to her in the fashion magazine L'officiel de le Mode from the 1930s. I suspect that she probably was working in someone else's millinery shop before that, given the Victorian or Edwardian characteristics of the hat (the way the lining is sewn together, the materials chosen, etc.), she obviously learned the trade and traditional techniques from other milliners of long standing. She was clearly still working through the 1930s-- my hat's shape is spot-on for the particular style of 'doll hats' that were popular right before the war-- but as yet, I have found no trace of Yvette Delort after the late 1930s. Perhaps she was one of the many French fashion workers who closed up shop at the start of the German occupation in 1940, and like a large number of them, wasn't able to recover enough financially to resume her business after the war was over.

So, I wanted to create a hat inspired by my little vintage favorite and the lady who made it, and turned to my custom hat block maker, Owen Morse Brown at Guy Morse Brown Hat Blocks, to design a set of blocks in the same vein. As usual, GMB came through for me with a fantastic work of art. Owen is as talented as all get-out. The 'Yvette' is not an exact copy of the vintage Delort hat, but an homage to it. I'm looking forward to experimenting with the 'Yvette' blocks to make hats in lots of colors and different types of felt (I'm planning one for myself in pea-green for daywear). While it is still a mini hat, it's a bit larger (in terms of head size) that the 'Belle Epoch' mini top hat that's been my best seller, and only half as tall. It should work better as a cross-over day-to-night hat than some of my other, more costume-y styles.

More photos coming soon, it looks even more striking in shiny long-napped 'beaver' felt!

ADS Hats has the charcoal gray one pictured in stock, and Dark Garden has one in black long-napped fur felt with black trim for sale right now.

There is nobody cooler than Grace Jones

Been thinking a lot about Grace Jones lately. Unlike so many of the empty 'celebrities' of today, who are famous for being famous, which is nothing other than their eagerness to expose themselves in public, Grace Jones is famous for being herself. And herself is more than enough to merit it. She is a musician, an actress, a model, and most of all, some kind of force of nature. She has mystery and is totally fierce. She's uncanny, and you don't really want to meet her in a dark alley. Seeing photos of her makes me feel a little bit of fear for my personal safety.












She seems completely fearless. It always impresses me that regardless of how much she is photographed with her clothes off, she never looks naked. She looks like she has just unencumbered herself from the inconvenience of clothing so that she can even more easily kick your ass.





As much as I think it's great that Lady Gaga plays dress-up, she'll never be this stone-cold amazing. Seeing photos of Lady Gaga, it's clear that she has a crack team of stylists on call 24/7 to do these things to her. The clothes are wearing her. She's transformed, but, like with artist Cindy Sherman, I'm always aware that there is a normal girl underneath. Speaking as a normal girl who also likes to dress up, that is great, and a feat in itself. On the other hand, Grace Jones is usually wearing some kind of crazy getup, but it's her force of personality that blasts you in the face. The outfit is just what she happened to be wearing when she stepped off her space ship to conquer the planet.

Spring / Summer 2011 Ready-to-Wear

I'm loving these looks from the *first* solo collection by Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen (McQueen's assistant for 15 years before his death last year).




They reminded me of these outfits from past McQueen shows.

Alexander McQueen, Fall/Winter 2006

I think about this outfit a lot. That entire show, titled 'The Widows of Culloden', is my all-time favorite McQueen Collection. See the video here.

Alexander McQueen, Fall / Winter 2010


She's pulled together influences from a lot of McQueen's past work, including his recurring bird motifs, the padded hips, and the Atlantis theme from Spring/Summer 2010 RTW. I have to agree with some of the fashion reviews I've been reading, she has softened the house's style around the edges. But I don't like that, really. I'll miss his perfectly sculpted Grace Jones-esque bodices and sharp tailoring. And the FW2010 hair and makeup are totally bland. Why the hippie braids?

See the rest of the show here. And, there are high-quality videos of runway shows going back to 2002, on the Alexander McQueen website.

I'm NOT loving anything from my other usual favorites from the Spring / Summer Ready-to-Wear 2011 collections, except for Dior's 1940s South Pacific-inspired collection.
Going against the trend of the last few years, there are not very many hats in these collections, except for these bland, identical Gilligan hats on Dior.

Couture is always more interesting anyway, and more chock-full of hats. Those shows are coming up at the end of January, so there is always hope for the future.

Una Bell Epoch Mini Top Hat

In a recent blog post about top hats, I included one of my favorite pictures of a female dandy, Una, Lady Troubridge (painted by Romaine Brooks).



I go back to this image again and again, it's an inspiration to me. I included it in the post about top hats, even though she's not wearing a hat, because I love her Lady Tux style and I like to imagine what kind of hat she would put on her head as she walks out the door after her portrait session, dressing up her head like a paper doll. Or maybe what she would wear later that night, going out with friends...

Here's one idea: the 'Una', the latest addition to my 'Belle Epoch' mini top hat range. This one is in midnight blue with black trim. Ribbon pleats circle the crown of the hat, ending in a large bow at the back of the hat.



It's topped with long, springy, curled black pheasant feathers.



The peek-a-boo veiling is a rare, antique silk net woven into a delicate hexagonal pattern, edged with a gorgeous lace border.





The veiling could be worn down over the eyes, or folded up onto the brim.



Today, I'm making up two more of these, one in all-black and another in red with black trim. I might also try one out in brown tones, but the veiling would be different, as I only found this veiling in black and in blue.

This one is available for sale now at ADS Hats on Valencia in San Francisco, and also online at Etsy and Smashing Darling.

Lady Tux

Since looking at all those images of top hats for a recent post, I can't stop thinking about lady tuxes. While I love making and wearing ultra-feminine and hyper-decorated hats, my personal taste in clothing tends to run in the Lady Tux direction- not normally feminine women's clothing, and not full man-drag, but somewhere in the middle. I like tend to go for formal, simple clothes with interesting lines but a minimum of pattern or surface decoration, and to save the flash for hats and other accessories. Here are some of my favorite images.

For a lady in menswear, you can't beat Marlene Dietrich.


Marlene outshines Cary Grant in an all-white tux.


Another white tux, on Katherine Hepburn.



Josephine Baker



Anna May Wong


All that Lady Tux action in the movies in the 1930s inspired some intrepid non-Hollywood ladies to try wearing pants for the first time. Here's an original 1933 sewing pattern for a Lady Tux. Copies available for sale at Eva Dress. It's on my 'someday' project list...


The Lady Tux had its Hollywood heyday in the 1930s, but its roots go all the way back to the beginnings of the 'menswear for women' trend that started in the Tudor period, which really gained traction in late 18th century. Before the late 1700s, only lady pirates wore men's clothing (in the Western world, anyway), except for the occasional masculine-ish equestrienne outfit worn only on horseback. But Marie Antoinette, for all that she is remembered for her frilly, flowery, feminine wedding-cake dresses, was also scandalously fond of wearing menswear. Not just women's clothing with 'masculine' details, but full-on breeches.

She even had a short-lived anti-corset phase during her teens (gasp!). In the 1780s, she and her fashionable friends adopted mens hairstyles, and designed dresses, coats and hats modeled on tweedy equestrian English-style menswear.

She spent astounding amounts of money on clothes, and made daring fashion choices throughout her life. Her sartorial indiscretions were the major reason she became more and more unpopular with the French people during her time as Queen, and were one of the precipitating factors of the French Revolution. For more on this fascinating subject, read 'Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution' by Caroline Weber.

Ironically, during and after the French Revolution, women throughout Europe adopted a menswear-inspired wardrobe that was very similar to the butch outfits for which Marie Antoinette had received so much crap just a few years earlier.



The following outfit is from the same timeframe. It's a pivotal image for me, and the earliest really Lady Tux-like outfit I've been able to find evidence of. Before discovering this photo, I was never that into the 18th century fashion-wise, but seeing this made me really interested in learning about the period. It's from a book of photos of costumes from the collection of the Victorian and Albert museum, published in 1908.


Throughout the 19th century, equestrienne wear had a definitely tux-like tone, and masculine details bled into daywear as well.




Ever since then, Lady Tuxes keep popping up in fashion, they're so classic that they're never really out of style.

Yves Saint Laurent started designing tuxedos for ladies, called 'Le Smoking', in the 1960s, and they became a staple of his career.


Dita Von Teese in formalwear, wearing a hat by Stephen Jones, 2008.


Daphne Guiness


Over the last few weeks, I've been working with my custom hat block maker on the design for full size top hat blocks. I should receive the first prototype block around the end of December, and then the rest of the set (so I can do a full range of sizes) a few weeks later. I can't wait, I'm positively squirming with excitement to add these to my range of hats.