Most of us mainly wear hats for practical reasons nowadays, to protect ourselves from the cold or the heat. Yet, when you leaf through vintage magazines, especially publications from the '40s or the '50s, and see some of the styles that were popular then, you find yourself thinking that it would be nice to start wearing again hats for style reasons.
One image that prompts such a return to hats is definitely a photograph taken by Erwin Blumenfeld for the cover of the August 1944 issue of Vogue. The image shows three models wearing felt hats with a crocheted skull cap underneath in contrasting colours.
The hats were designed by Sally Victor, famous for her sculptural creations such as her stacked Guggenheim-inspired hat from the '60s.
Born in 1905, Victor first fell in love with hat-making when her family moved from Pennsylvania to New York where her aunt had a millinery shop. At 18 she began working in the millinery department of Macy's as a stock girl. A year later she became assistant millinery buyer, and then she moved on to L. Bamberger's department store in Newark where she worked as chief millinery buyer.
She married Sergiu F. Victor, who headed the wholesale millinery house of Serge and briefly retired, but soon returned to millinery, working as head designer at her husband's firm.
By 1934 she already had a label under her own name, with a millinery salon on East 53rd Street in New York and sold her designs in high-profile stores, including Lord & Taylor on Fifth Avenue. She became well-known and her creations also appeared in the film Vogues of 1938 by Irving Cummings.
In 1943 she was the recipient of the Fashion Critics' Millinery Award, but Victor didn't just focus on high-end creations. During World War II, she designed a beret for the Cadet Nurse Corps and created for General Electric a denim work hat with an attached adjustable snood to protect the long hair of woman workers, preventing accidents (the crocheted skull-caps on the cover of Vogue were the stylish version of this functional working hat).
Victor also created hats for first ladies, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Mamie Eisenhower (who donned the striking "Airwave" hat at her husband Dwight's inauguration in 1953) and Jacqueline Kennedy.
For the 1952 Presidential campaign, the milliner worked on an affordable "I Like Ike" blue faille pillbox beret for women with a red cockade to which Ike buttons could be attached. Yet Victor was also favoured by Hollywood actresses, among the others Irene Dunne, Helen Hayes, and Merle Oberon.
Victor had a passion for unique inspirations: a member of the Edward C. Blum "Design Laboratory", she often used the Brooklyn Museum's collections as starting points for her baby bonnets, pompadour hats, Flemish sailor and Grecian pillbox designs, for the so-called "curvette" hats and cap-berets (also known as C-B).
She created hats inspired by Native American art, Chinese lanterns, Japanese armours and artists and architects, including Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Rogier van der Weyden, and Frank Lloyd Wright.
About her inspirations she once stated in a 1949 interview on the St. Petersburg Times, "Here in New York there are more sources of inspiration than anywhere else in the world. Many of the greatest old masters, as well as a wealth of modern arts, are housed in our museums and galleries, But I find inspiration everywhere – in the city streets, the headlines, the new plays and on the radio to mention just a few. I never know just when an inspiration for a new hat idea is going to strike me or where it will come from."
Victor's work is often compared to that of Lilly Daché and John P. John, Victor actually displayed some differences from her colleagues: she was very much into sculpted silhouettes and architectural hats in wool or straw.
Besides, she created intriguing collapsible circular hats, designs that a lady could pack up flat and take with her on a journey.
These designs featured a collapsible crown and a brim that remained stiff, in this way the hat could be easily placed flat in a suitcase for travel and could be popped back into shape when the wearer needed.
The Met Museum's archive in New York stores some wonderful examples of Sally Victor's hats, such as a concentric and collapsible straw hat from 1945, but there are other creations as well, including hats in wool characterised by arty folds and pleats or elaborate ivory straw headdresses that are clearly inspired by Japanese armours.
The designs preserved in the archive prove that Victor followed architectural principles while creating her hats.
It may be rare to stumble in a vintage shop in a Sally Victor creation, but, if you like her idea of collapsible hats, you can still buy collapsible straw pieces from traditional milliners such as Giuliana Longo's shop in Venice.
Rispondi