Irenebrination is celebrating (while thinking about stripy hats…)

Something extraordinary happened in the last few days. An Internet search allowed me to discover that sadly my mum’s cousin in the States died just a few weeks ago. We had lost track of him, but I luckily managed to find through the Internet his daughter and get in touch with her.

As you can imagine some emotional emails followed and now we are trying to trace back a bit of family history and discovering things about each other and our families.

To celebrate this extraordinary finding I’m posting here a picture of my mum’s uncle and aunt, Daniele Mammarella and Ernesta Rapposelli, who immigrated to the States in the 1900s. There’s no official date on the back of the picture, but it was taken in Chieti, probably in the early 30s, between 1930 and 1931.

Auntie Ernestina in this image is sporting a hat that always intrigued me: it looks like a stripy cloche hat with a sort of avant-garde detail added: a tongue of fabric seems to extend from under the hat on the side of the right ear and be pinned on top of the wearer’s head. I’ve recently been thinking how such a hat – which shouldn’t be too hard to make – could be actually updated a bit. That's something I'll be thinking about in the next few days.

The picture made me think about another stripy hat design, more sophisticated than the other one, shown in this illustration by René Gruau (yes, he deserves a post on it owns and will hopefully get it one of these days…), that portrays a woman wearing a Yves Saint Laurent hat. This stylish illustration was published on the cover of Madame Figaro on 15th March 1986.

These two images made me develop a mild obsession with stripy hat designs in the last few days, though I still haven't found on eBay any interesting vintage stripy headgear. The search, I guess, will continue…

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