Reviews: Hat class bibliography, plus vintage knitting bonus stuffs
The craftwork class i'm teaching this semester is a fairly broad introduction to millinery--it's challenging, in that it is aimed at production graduate students and presumes that those enrolled have advanced/couture sewing skills, but it also is designed for students who have had minimal or no hat-making experience. unluckymonkey asked me for recommendations on hatmaking info sources (specifically for felt hats), and that spurred me to make a post similar to the one a while back on my shoe class bibliography.
For the first unit, an overview of buckram hat form construction, i have the students read Tim Dial's book, Basic Millinery for the Stage. (It's a short book, so that goes quick.) It's a concise, straightforward overview of Mr. Dial's methods for stageworthy hatmaking, and if you've never made a hat or looked inside the "guts" of one, it's probably the best place to start. It's got photographs and diagrams to help elaborate on the text and is written in an easy-to-understand manner. If your interest in hatmaking is not for stage performance, bear in mind that Dial's book is aimed toward that--his techniques focus on speeding up production time and maximizing the durability of the hats. Stage millinery is slightly different from traditional millinery, in that traditional millinery employs meticulous handwork--often in a theatre milliner's construction, we'll substitute machine-stitching where possible in the interest of time-saving and durability.
The other required text for the course is Denise Dreher's From the Neck Up: An Illustrated Guide to Hatmaking. This book is much more in-depth than the Dial book and features an appendix with miniaturized pattern shapes for a variety of historical hat shapes. (I've found that, though you can scale these up and use them as patterns, they don't always scale up perfectly and are better viewed as guidelines for the shapes you're looking to make than hard-and-fast accurate patterns.) In addition to being an accomplished milliner for stage and film, Dreher has an extensive background in the study of millinery history so the book includes a lot of interesting information on hatmaking techniques of the past--for example, she discusses willow, a material once often used in millinery but which is (to my knowledge) no longer produced. I found three sheets of willow in our storage (presumably from some bygone donation of millinery supplies), so the information on working with it will come in handy for me very soon. This historical aspect of the book is also of particular interest to milliners who might be refurbishing vintage or antique hats, and who might come across techniques or materials in the interior with which they are unfamiliar.
A book that you'll find in many workshop libraries, but which i personally don't care for, is Classic Millinery Techniques: A Complete Guide to Making and Designing Today's Hats, by Ann Albrizio and Osnat Lustig, and by "today's hats" they mean "hats of the late 1980s and early 1990s," as the book was published in 1998. It includes a lot of color photography and the sections on trim and feathers are helpful (particularly the photo-map showing the various types of feathers, which can be a great resource when ordering feathers sight-unseen from a feather dealer, to make sure you order the right types), but it's specifically aimed toward those wishing to pursue millinery from a contemporary fashion design perspective and thus, for theatrical purposes, contains a lot of superfluous information. Additionally, it contains several errors--such as the mislabeling of a photo which erroneously illustrates the difference between millinery grosgrain and grosgrain ribbon--that can be confusing to the novice milliner.
The book also works my nerves with respect to my major pet peeve, flippancy about artisan safety. While i recognize that safety education is sorely lacking in most trade fields and that nearly all reference materials for topics like millinery have some poor advice or omissions about protecting one's self from hazardous chemicals, it really jerks my chain when modern references are practically dismissive about such things--this book contains attempts at drollery in this vein, such as advising the reader to use chemicals that potentially pose respiratory hazards, then adding a parenthetical afterthought like "(Did you remember to open a window?)" Are you kidding me?
I know it's a nerdy-safety-goggley thing, but i truly believe that educators and experts do newcomers to the field a vast disservice by omitting serious discussion of worker safety. It's an oft-trotted-out trade workhorse to note that the phrase, "mad as a hatter," came from early milliners burning out their brain cells working with mercury-based felt sizing chemicals, but it's so oft trotted-out because it's a point of import that cannot be stressed enough: the onus is on the artisan to be vigilant, informed, and cautious about hazards in the workplace. Don't just "open a window, ha-ha," when working with solvent-based chemicals--get yourself a fit-tested mo-effen respirator with the right freaking cartridges and use it, please. Otherwise, well, enjoy your dalliance on that primrose path, but mark my words, that's the road to uncontrollable tremors and three-headed babies and such. There's a prevailing misconception that, because nobody's chained to their sewing machine in a burning shirtwaist factory, and because organizations like OSHA exist and laws are out there on the books, somehow we all live and work in safe environments. We don't, so be alert and tune up your BS-meter when reading reference books that don't adequately address precautionary safety measures. Costuming is fun, but it's a surprisingly dangerous job.
Wow, i think that's the first rant in this blog. Whoops! I try to keep it even-keeled and professional here, but this particular subject really gets me het-up. So...uh, back to your regularly-scheduled book review...
One book that's not useful for technique instruction but is indispensible as a reference for period shapes, research, and inspiration is Susan Langley's Vintage Hats and Bonnets 1770-1970: Identification and Values. It's written for a readership of collectors and dealers in vintage and antique millinery, but it's amazing for theatrical and historical costumers as well. It's divided into chapters by decade, each one beginning with a brief overview of what was going on at the time in fashion and the world in general, followed by pages of photographs and illustrations: period photos, modern photos of surviving period hats, catalogue illustrations, fashion magazine pictures from the time, all kinds of great stuff! My ongoing coal-scuttle bonnet project comes from a resource image in this book.
I also have a number of reprinted period sources in my shop's reference library, of which i'll mention two that are fairly easily obtainable. The first is Millinery for Every Woman, by Georgina Kerr Kaye. The original was published in 1926, but it's been reprinted by Lacis. Of particular use in my class has been the sections on working with velvet as a cover fabric and the extensive chapter at the end on creating garniture shapes from fabric and ribbon.
(Vocab: garniture, noun - an ornamental piece of decor on a hat or garment. Feel free to use this term where you otherwise might use words like "thingamajiggy" or "whatchamacallit" or "doohickey." I found it in a 1920s magazine article on making cockades for cloches and dropped-waist dresses that need an ornamental focal-point and i love it. GARNITURE, a word i have been looking for to no avail for ages!)
Another book we've perused for period shaping and draping techniques is Edwardian Hats: The Art of Millinery, by Mme. Anna Ben-Yusuf, first published in 1909. A good reference source, but also quite fascinating from an anthropological perspective--millinery being one of the trades a woman could respectably earn a living at in the period, the book also features some business advice on how one might run a successful milliner's shop from one's parlor, including information on bookkeeping, business costs, and market trends in hat fashion at the time. The book also includes some catalogue illustrations at the beginning from a publication called Correct Dress: Fall & Winter 1908-09 Cool stuff, if that interests you!
(Incidentally, i am dying to know more about Mme. Ben-Yusuf; all i know is that she was a millinery instructor at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NYC at the turn of the century, and in addition to writing this book, she contributed a number of articles and columns to trade journals on hatmaking. I suspect that she was related somehow to the reknowned portrait photographer of the period, Zaida Ben-Yusuf, who maintained a studio in New York for a brief time in the 1890s-1900s. Her surname implies that she and/or her husband were of Arabic descent, but the trade moniker of "Madame Anna" suggests a European connection as well. A French mode of address ("madame") was common in the millinery trade, whether one had any French background or not, to give a fashionable "Parisienne" impression of the milliner to her clients, and "Anna" could be anything from Russian to Greek to Hebrew to Catalan, who knows. The prospect of, speculatively, two women, Anna and Zaida, sisters-in-law, immigrants, both making their living as reknowned and successful artists and artisans in Edwardian New York! Fascinating! Someone write me that as a novel, please. Or perhaps i should get typing and do it myself. Ha! Wow, i digress. You see though why at one point i thought i wanted a PhD in costume history.)
Again with the nerdy-safety-goggley warning: as with any period reference, there are some truly disturbing portions of these books--i had a grim laugh at the section on using gasoline to treat feathers and hat bases--so use your judgment when consulting them for practical advice on technique. Imagine: a millinery studio lit by gaslight, with milliners using gasoline in open containers... Egad.
unluckymonkey asked specifically for online resources, so here are a couple of links:
For an excellent glossary on hatmaking terminology and a wonderfully in-depth sidebar of links on all aspects of millinery, check out Hats UK. It's a website run by the British trade publication The Hat Magazine, and has a forum section for discussions and advice queries as well.
The Village Hat Shop has a wonderful page with links to photos depicting a wide range of millinery subjects, including blocking felt hats, designing hats, dyeing hats, etc.
In a related note, I'm excited that a recent La Bricoleuse article on straw hat rejuvenation got recommended on the Hartford York Hats blog! Dunno how they found me, but i appreciate the shout-out!
Got a favorite hat book, periodical, or website link? Please comment!
Oh, and! Not entirely unrelated, because there's a chapter on hat patterns in it, but i wanted to mention a book i recently bought and am super-excited about: Lion Brand Yarn Vintage Styles for Today: More Than 50 Patterns to Knit and Crochet. Each pattern is introduced with a period photograph or illustration depicting the garment worked and worn by a historically-contemporary model, then a modern photograph of the piece made with modern yarn and worn by a modern model. It's super cool to see, say, a grainy old tintype of a woman sporting a knit cardigan, then that same cardigan worked up today! I have obtained the yarn for my first project from this book--a cap-sleeve shrug taken from a 1950s original. One caution though: these are not exact reproductions of the original garments and won't result in finished products that will necessarily stand up to "period Nazi" critiquing. They've been modified to take into account modern undergarments and are intended to result in pieces that can be worn currently without period underpinnings like corsetry and such. I do think that from a crafts artisanship perspective, if you needed to create a period piece for a production, one could work backwards from the archival photographs using the patterns as a guide and recreate the antique garment with deductive modifications.
I guess my project of creating knitted spatterdashes (in which i did exactly that, work backward from a photo reference) had its intended effect: namely, getting me excited about expanding my skill at knitwork and crochet!
For the first unit, an overview of buckram hat form construction, i have the students read Tim Dial's book, Basic Millinery for the Stage. (It's a short book, so that goes quick.) It's a concise, straightforward overview of Mr. Dial's methods for stageworthy hatmaking, and if you've never made a hat or looked inside the "guts" of one, it's probably the best place to start. It's got photographs and diagrams to help elaborate on the text and is written in an easy-to-understand manner. If your interest in hatmaking is not for stage performance, bear in mind that Dial's book is aimed toward that--his techniques focus on speeding up production time and maximizing the durability of the hats. Stage millinery is slightly different from traditional millinery, in that traditional millinery employs meticulous handwork--often in a theatre milliner's construction, we'll substitute machine-stitching where possible in the interest of time-saving and durability.
The other required text for the course is Denise Dreher's From the Neck Up: An Illustrated Guide to Hatmaking. This book is much more in-depth than the Dial book and features an appendix with miniaturized pattern shapes for a variety of historical hat shapes. (I've found that, though you can scale these up and use them as patterns, they don't always scale up perfectly and are better viewed as guidelines for the shapes you're looking to make than hard-and-fast accurate patterns.) In addition to being an accomplished milliner for stage and film, Dreher has an extensive background in the study of millinery history so the book includes a lot of interesting information on hatmaking techniques of the past--for example, she discusses willow, a material once often used in millinery but which is (to my knowledge) no longer produced. I found three sheets of willow in our storage (presumably from some bygone donation of millinery supplies), so the information on working with it will come in handy for me very soon. This historical aspect of the book is also of particular interest to milliners who might be refurbishing vintage or antique hats, and who might come across techniques or materials in the interior with which they are unfamiliar.
A book that you'll find in many workshop libraries, but which i personally don't care for, is Classic Millinery Techniques: A Complete Guide to Making and Designing Today's Hats, by Ann Albrizio and Osnat Lustig, and by "today's hats" they mean "hats of the late 1980s and early 1990s," as the book was published in 1998. It includes a lot of color photography and the sections on trim and feathers are helpful (particularly the photo-map showing the various types of feathers, which can be a great resource when ordering feathers sight-unseen from a feather dealer, to make sure you order the right types), but it's specifically aimed toward those wishing to pursue millinery from a contemporary fashion design perspective and thus, for theatrical purposes, contains a lot of superfluous information. Additionally, it contains several errors--such as the mislabeling of a photo which erroneously illustrates the difference between millinery grosgrain and grosgrain ribbon--that can be confusing to the novice milliner.
The book also works my nerves with respect to my major pet peeve, flippancy about artisan safety. While i recognize that safety education is sorely lacking in most trade fields and that nearly all reference materials for topics like millinery have some poor advice or omissions about protecting one's self from hazardous chemicals, it really jerks my chain when modern references are practically dismissive about such things--this book contains attempts at drollery in this vein, such as advising the reader to use chemicals that potentially pose respiratory hazards, then adding a parenthetical afterthought like "(Did you remember to open a window?)" Are you kidding me?
I know it's a nerdy-safety-goggley thing, but i truly believe that educators and experts do newcomers to the field a vast disservice by omitting serious discussion of worker safety. It's an oft-trotted-out trade workhorse to note that the phrase, "mad as a hatter," came from early milliners burning out their brain cells working with mercury-based felt sizing chemicals, but it's so oft trotted-out because it's a point of import that cannot be stressed enough: the onus is on the artisan to be vigilant, informed, and cautious about hazards in the workplace. Don't just "open a window, ha-ha," when working with solvent-based chemicals--get yourself a fit-tested mo-effen respirator with the right freaking cartridges and use it, please. Otherwise, well, enjoy your dalliance on that primrose path, but mark my words, that's the road to uncontrollable tremors and three-headed babies and such. There's a prevailing misconception that, because nobody's chained to their sewing machine in a burning shirtwaist factory, and because organizations like OSHA exist and laws are out there on the books, somehow we all live and work in safe environments. We don't, so be alert and tune up your BS-meter when reading reference books that don't adequately address precautionary safety measures. Costuming is fun, but it's a surprisingly dangerous job.
Wow, i think that's the first rant in this blog. Whoops! I try to keep it even-keeled and professional here, but this particular subject really gets me het-up. So...uh, back to your regularly-scheduled book review...
One book that's not useful for technique instruction but is indispensible as a reference for period shapes, research, and inspiration is Susan Langley's Vintage Hats and Bonnets 1770-1970: Identification and Values. It's written for a readership of collectors and dealers in vintage and antique millinery, but it's amazing for theatrical and historical costumers as well. It's divided into chapters by decade, each one beginning with a brief overview of what was going on at the time in fashion and the world in general, followed by pages of photographs and illustrations: period photos, modern photos of surviving period hats, catalogue illustrations, fashion magazine pictures from the time, all kinds of great stuff! My ongoing coal-scuttle bonnet project comes from a resource image in this book.
I also have a number of reprinted period sources in my shop's reference library, of which i'll mention two that are fairly easily obtainable. The first is Millinery for Every Woman, by Georgina Kerr Kaye. The original was published in 1926, but it's been reprinted by Lacis. Of particular use in my class has been the sections on working with velvet as a cover fabric and the extensive chapter at the end on creating garniture shapes from fabric and ribbon.
(Vocab: garniture, noun - an ornamental piece of decor on a hat or garment. Feel free to use this term where you otherwise might use words like "thingamajiggy" or "whatchamacallit" or "doohickey." I found it in a 1920s magazine article on making cockades for cloches and dropped-waist dresses that need an ornamental focal-point and i love it. GARNITURE, a word i have been looking for to no avail for ages!)
Another book we've perused for period shaping and draping techniques is Edwardian Hats: The Art of Millinery, by Mme. Anna Ben-Yusuf, first published in 1909. A good reference source, but also quite fascinating from an anthropological perspective--millinery being one of the trades a woman could respectably earn a living at in the period, the book also features some business advice on how one might run a successful milliner's shop from one's parlor, including information on bookkeeping, business costs, and market trends in hat fashion at the time. The book also includes some catalogue illustrations at the beginning from a publication called Correct Dress: Fall & Winter 1908-09 Cool stuff, if that interests you!
(Incidentally, i am dying to know more about Mme. Ben-Yusuf; all i know is that she was a millinery instructor at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NYC at the turn of the century, and in addition to writing this book, she contributed a number of articles and columns to trade journals on hatmaking. I suspect that she was related somehow to the reknowned portrait photographer of the period, Zaida Ben-Yusuf, who maintained a studio in New York for a brief time in the 1890s-1900s. Her surname implies that she and/or her husband were of Arabic descent, but the trade moniker of "Madame Anna" suggests a European connection as well. A French mode of address ("madame") was common in the millinery trade, whether one had any French background or not, to give a fashionable "Parisienne" impression of the milliner to her clients, and "Anna" could be anything from Russian to Greek to Hebrew to Catalan, who knows. The prospect of, speculatively, two women, Anna and Zaida, sisters-in-law, immigrants, both making their living as reknowned and successful artists and artisans in Edwardian New York! Fascinating! Someone write me that as a novel, please. Or perhaps i should get typing and do it myself. Ha! Wow, i digress. You see though why at one point i thought i wanted a PhD in costume history.)
Again with the nerdy-safety-goggley warning: as with any period reference, there are some truly disturbing portions of these books--i had a grim laugh at the section on using gasoline to treat feathers and hat bases--so use your judgment when consulting them for practical advice on technique. Imagine: a millinery studio lit by gaslight, with milliners using gasoline in open containers... Egad.
unluckymonkey asked specifically for online resources, so here are a couple of links:
For an excellent glossary on hatmaking terminology and a wonderfully in-depth sidebar of links on all aspects of millinery, check out Hats UK. It's a website run by the British trade publication The Hat Magazine, and has a forum section for discussions and advice queries as well.
The Village Hat Shop has a wonderful page with links to photos depicting a wide range of millinery subjects, including blocking felt hats, designing hats, dyeing hats, etc.
In a related note, I'm excited that a recent La Bricoleuse article on straw hat rejuvenation got recommended on the Hartford York Hats blog! Dunno how they found me, but i appreciate the shout-out!
Got a favorite hat book, periodical, or website link? Please comment!
Oh, and! Not entirely unrelated, because there's a chapter on hat patterns in it, but i wanted to mention a book i recently bought and am super-excited about: Lion Brand Yarn Vintage Styles for Today: More Than 50 Patterns to Knit and Crochet. Each pattern is introduced with a period photograph or illustration depicting the garment worked and worn by a historically-contemporary model, then a modern photograph of the piece made with modern yarn and worn by a modern model. It's super cool to see, say, a grainy old tintype of a woman sporting a knit cardigan, then that same cardigan worked up today! I have obtained the yarn for my first project from this book--a cap-sleeve shrug taken from a 1950s original. One caution though: these are not exact reproductions of the original garments and won't result in finished products that will necessarily stand up to "period Nazi" critiquing. They've been modified to take into account modern undergarments and are intended to result in pieces that can be worn currently without period underpinnings like corsetry and such. I do think that from a crafts artisanship perspective, if you needed to create a period piece for a production, one could work backwards from the archival photographs using the patterns as a guide and recreate the antique garment with deductive modifications.
I guess my project of creating knitted spatterdashes (in which i did exactly that, work backward from a photo reference) had its intended effect: namely, getting me excited about expanding my skill at knitwork and crochet!