Let's continue the straw hat thread that we started last Sunday with a look at other types of vintage straw hats, this time by Robert Dudley.
As you may remember from a previous post, New York milliner Robert Dudley was well-known in the '40s and the '50s, when he operated the Chez Robert salon at Saks Fifth Avenue and his own shop, Robert Dudley Originals, on the East Side of Manhattan.
Born in Rochester, Dudley moved to New York as a young man to pursue a career in the theatre, but then decided to become a milliner when he used an old felt hat to create a new one for a friend.
At the end of the ‘30s some milliners actively joined the war efforts: Sally Victor, for example, came up with 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 women workers, preventing accidents.
Dudley instead first committed an embarrassing faux pas, creating in 1939 cringing hats inspired by the Second World War (including a Hitler hat that was meant to mock the dictator, but was just in terrible bad taste View this photo, while his torpedo, periscope and cannon hat, the latter with a puff of organza smoke coming out of it, View this photo, were ridiculous rather than surreal – File under: "Things to avoid as a designer"),
Eventually Dudley joined the war efforts coming up with a felt hat that had a brim that could be styled in five different ways and with a removable veil.
The hat supported the Allied war effort as it was available in patriotic colours including navy and red.
By the '40s Dudley had become a bit of a favourite for many theatre and society figures and he designed hats for several films, including "Rebecca" (1940).
In this romantic psychological thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock, actress Joan Fontaine starring as the young woman who becomes the second wife of Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier) dons at a certain point a summery gown matched with a straw hat decorated with fabric flowers.
Yet, between the '50s and the '60s Dudley went beyond the more classic romantic hats and used straw to create architectural designs. Straw hats are often associated with beachwear, but Dudley’s were meant for the city, as proved by the three hats illustrating the beginning of this post.
The three hats – one from the '50s, another from 1955 circa and the third one from the '60s – had iconic shapes: the first one formed a halo around the head of the wearer and featured a minimalist decorative straw element knotted on the front.
The curling sides of the second hat evoked the shapes of the roofs seen in Japanese woodblocking prints from the Sōsaku-hanga art movement (View this photo), while the third one featured a bi-coloured pleated motif that formed a structure reminiscent of the roofs of temples in Bangkok (think the Wat Benjamabhopit or Marble Temple – View this photo – to get an idea).
Want to reinterpret the hats in rather unusual ways? Try remixing them with Artificial Intelligence.
In the first case Midjourney combined the colour of the hat box with the minimalist knotted element on the hat and came up with helmet-like designs in ivory and blue characterized by a series of dynamic bold curves formed by intersecting straps of a semi-rigid material (could that be leather, PVC or maybe shape memory polymer straps?)
The remix of the second hat was rather puzzling as Midjourney came up with a hat that looks like a safari helmet and transformed the lateral curled up sides of the hat into an elongated leather strap.
In the third transformation, Midjourney managed to preserve the architectural aspect, coming up with a modernist hat in which the straw was replaced by other materials (fabric? paper? wood? Not sure, actually).
In this case Artificial Intelligence remixed the bi-coloured pleated motif, coming up with a white hat with a dark / light brown architectural element (in the second interpretation of this hat, this element actually looks like a fin).
If you still prefer straw hats with an architectural element, keep on playing around with Midjourney: in the last two examples in this post Artificial Intelligence produced hats incorporating sweeping curves reminiscent of the three-dimensional curved surfaces representing an aircraft's aerodynamic turbulence field in the Maths gallery designed by Zaha Hadid for London's Science Museum (even though in my prompt I didn't include this reference; mind you, the first straw hat produced by Midjourney also evokes in my mind the Teletubbies…).
The final verdict? Well, architectural straw hats designed by Midjourney may not be perfect yet, but experimenting with them can be enjoyable and surprising as well.
