Focus on fashion clues: (12) Ladies’ headwear 1840s–1860s

This column explains all the recognised methods of dating old family photos and we now scrutinise our ancestors’ appearance as they posed before the camera. Clothes, accessories and hairstyles are key stylistic details, and when correctly identified provide an accurate time frame for portrait photos. Moving on from menswear, we now study female modes, starting at the top with headwear, an important element of Victorian dress. Women could be pictured bareheaded in the studio, although older ladies often wore indoor caps while some women wore, or held, fashionable bonnets or hats. Here we look at styles from the 1840s to 1860s.

• Rare daguerreotype photographs from the 1840s and early 1850s display early-victorian modes. If not wearing outdoor clothes, mature and married ladies often covered their heads with an enveloping white day cap of traditional tall style or a more modern rounded shape. Otherwise, bonnets tied with broad ribbons below the chin mainly occur in early photographs, narrow poke bonnets of the early to mid 1840s gradually widening into a circular shape from mid-decade, framing the face

• More family photos survive from the mid 1850s onwards. Studio Ambrotypes (mid to late 1850s to early 1860s) and early cartes de visite, dating to the 1860s, may portray married and/or older ladies wearing indoor headgear, following mid-victorian social etiquette. Narrow headband-like items and more substantial caps were frequently decorated with frills, lace, ribbons, flowers and sometimes long trailing lappets

• Bonnets were the most common outdoor headwear during the 1850s and early 1860s, being circular in shape and often featuring a curtain of fabric (or bavolet) at the back. From c.1862 bonnets grew taller and oval in style, or ‘spoon-shaped’

• For summer, and some leisure and sporting activities, low-crowned, brimmed straw hats circled with ribbon and trimmed with flowers or feather plumes were an alternative fashion in the 1850s and 1860s

• Simultaneously, in the late 1850s and early mid 1860s, semi-casual, neat, rounded ‘pork-pie’ and ‘muffin’ hats also became popular. Fitting the head closely, they were ideal for walking and active pursuits. These were often made of soft velvet or felt and trimmed with plumes or circled with feathers

• From the mid to late 1860s in general, bonnets grew increasingly outmoded, worn mainly by older ladies, while younger fashionable women favoured structured hats.

1 Daguerreotype from the 1840s of a mature woman in a white ‘day cap’ (James Morley) 2 Carte de visite from 1867 – the woman’s cap bears decorative flowers (Ron Cosens Collection) 3 Ambrotype, mid to late 1850s, showing a woman in outdoor headwear (James Morley) 4 Carte de visite, c.1861, of a woman in a brimmed straw hat (Ron Cosens) 5 Carte de visite, c.1865 – the woman’s neat, round hat has decorative trim (Jayne Shrimpton) 6 Amateur photograph, mid 1860s, showing another example of outdoor headwear (Jayne Shrimpton)