I love hats!! I really do! There’re the best! Any excuse to wear one, I’m there! In fact I don’t need an excuse! So it really makes me sad working on period dramas these days to realise how ‘Anti-hat’ they have become! If I hear one more time from a production “We really don’t like hats! They don’t relate to a modern audience!” I’ll bloody scream. The reason why most people watch period dramas is because it is far removed from today’s clothing and it’s different.
That’s what makes it escapism. Another reason productions don’t like hats is they say it hides an actors face. I find this a strange excuse, as these days you can film anything like: a billion people falling off a building into a fire ball explosion and maybe add some horses and thunder storms into that!but you can’t film a person in hat and show their face! Please! That said I might have to agree with that case with these hats! The Edwardian era was home to many fads and fashions which hearkened to bygone days, and the Merry Widow hat craze was no exception.
The hat was part of the costume designed by Lucile for statuesque English theater star Lily Elsie, who was to play the main character, Hanna Glawari, in the 1907 English adaptation of Franz Lehár’s operetta, Die lustige Witwe. The play was an immediate sensation, and its wonderful, frothy signature tune, the Merry Widow Waltz, became the craze of the Season.
However, it was the hat worn by Elsie, that black, wide-brimmed, hat covered with filmy chiffon and festooned with piles of feathers, became the look for fashionable women over the next three years.
The hat, reaching such widths as eighteen inches, and topped with all kinds of trimmings (even whole stuffed birds!), was a direct descendant of the “Gainsborough” hat worn by the Duchess of Devonshire in that artist’s portrait.
Predictably, the increasing fashion for this hat resulted in endless jokes in popular magazines like Punch, whose issues frequently poked fun at the difficulties one could get into when wearing a Merry Widow hat or being near a lady wearing one.
