New Canaan Museum features Mad Hatter exhibit
Hats reflect history. The change in a woman’s roles and silhouettes are mirrored by their hats, from a submissive bonnet to a symbol of liberation with the pink pussy cap associated with the #metoo movement. These along with the many stages in between can be seen at the “Hat Madness” exhibition at the New Canaan Museum and Historical Society.
While the shape of a man’s hat has changed little, the history demonstrated in this exhibition, which will last until March 8 at 13 Oenoke Ridge, starts with men’s top hats, ranging from bowler to Fedora.
A branch of the Benedict family — a name known in New Canaan for making shoes — moved to Danbury, aka the Hat City.
Around 1780, Zadoc Benedict discovered, “if you took beaver pelts and boiled them in water with mercury nitrate for about a day, the fur would separate from the skin,” guest curator Penny Havard said as she gave the Advertiser a tour on Friday, Dec. 6.
There is only one beaver pelt hat in the show, which is encased, because the pelt top hats “still contain traces of the toxic mercury nitrate, a toxic substance,” Havard said.
In 1860, “Alice in Wonderland” author Lewis Carroll used the term the “Mad Hatter,” but two decades earlier it was known that “people who worked in hat factories all had what we called the Danbury shakes,” from the toxicity, Havard said.
By 1904, Danbury supplied the industry with 75 percent of the hat bodies in the United States, and recently the Danbury Museum made valuable contributions to the New Canaan exhibit(ion), Nancy Geary, executive director at the Museum and Historical Society Executive Director said.
One wall is dedicated to men’s hats.
“For men’s hats the crown went up and down, but the overall style didn’t change much,” Havard said.
However, the changes in women’s hat were dramatic.
Clothes and accessories of each era accompany the hats for the exhibition.
The drama of feminine hats
From the early 1800s to the 1840s, “One of the things in these large hats, the women in them had no peripheral vision,” Havard said.
“At the time women were still thought of as property. Men did not want their wives or fiances looking out of the corner of their eyes at other gentlemen, ” Havard said. “It was very controlling.”
By 18801909, with the advent of the car, the silhouette changed to simpler, straighter.
“Women could not go out in a car with a big hat with a lot of stuff on it. They could lose it,” Havard said.
“Motoring also changed the shape of the dress, because big skirts were dangerous in early cars because all the gears were open” and a dress “could get caught in the moving gears,” she said.
Amid many changes, one preference endured for decades: “Women fell in love with bird feathers,” to the extent ”you had a problem with the near extinction of shore birds and especially egrets and birds of paradise,’ Havard said.
Between 1880s and 1900 the fashion craze “nearly wiped out the snowy egret,” and “it took a long time for [the trend] to die out,” she said.
“In 1940, they still used this bird on evening hats,” Havard said. “It’s criminal. The Victorians did not realize that the supply of wildlife was finite.”
In the early 1900s, the silhouette changed again. In 1915, women started wearing loosefitting trousers to work in factories and to march for the right to vote. During this time, young women wore hats with a circumference often wider than the wearer’s shoulders.
In the Roaring 1920s, flappers wore largebrimmed hats over curly hair until around 1926, when the more diminutive Choche hat took over after Louise Brooks popularized the shingle bob and the skirt length became shorter.
It was mostly the young women who enjoyed fads because “they were more willing to cut their hair and try something very daring,” Havard said.
“For many decades a woman could not go out of the house without a hat and gloves, even to put a letter in the mailbox, “but in the 1930 and1940s “you are seeing the breakdown of that,” Havard said.
The 1950s and 1960s everything is “matchy, matchy as we call it,” she said. During the era of first ladies Mamie Eisenhower and Jacqueline Kennedy everything was beautifully coordinated and matched.
During this time hats were made more in factories, rather than in milliner shops, and examples of the are shown in a large rectangular show case of hats.
“You can tell there’s a huge amount of variety that are available. But they are really coordinated with the rest of the outfit, always,” Havard said.
The Museum and Historical Society has the second largest textile collections in the state of Connecticut, with 3,500 items.