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List of contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: Milaners to Milliners
Chapter 2: The Woman’s Sphere
Chapter 3: War and Millinery
Chapter 4: The Gilded Age
Chapter 5: The Progressive Age
Chapter 6: The Men of The Milliner
Chapter 7: 1920s
Chapter 8: 1930s
Chapter 9: War and Style
Chapter 10: Rise of the Hairstyle
Chapter 11: French-Fried Curls
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Nadine Stewart is Adjunct Professor of Fashion History at Montclair State University, USA, and a visiting lecturer at The Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, USA.
Summary
Studies of millinery tend to focus on hats, rather than the extraordinarily skilled workers who create them. American Milliners and their World sets out to redress the balance, examining the position of the milliner in American society from the 18th to the 20th century. Concentrating on the struggle of female hat-makers to claim their social place, it investigates how they were influenced by changing attitudes towards women in the workplace.
Drawing on diaries, etiquette books, trade journals and contemporary literature, Stewart illustrates how making hats became big business, but milliners’ working conditions failed to improve. Taking the reader from the Industrial Revolution of the 1760s to the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and from Belle Epoque feathers to elegant cloches and Jackie Kennedy's pillbox hat, the book offers a new insight into the rise and fall of a fashionable industry.
Beautifully illustrated and packed with original research, American Milliners and their World blends fashion history and anthropology to tell the forgotten stories of the women behind some of the most iconic hats of the last three centuries.
Foreword
This book examines the social world of the American milliner from the 18th century to the 1960s, focusing on the female workers who made the hats, and their struggle to assume a position in society.
Additional text
This absorbing social history delves into the feminine world of milliners - notoriously underpaid and exploited - and the ambitious entrepreneurs, immigrants, retailers, and reformers who shaped the industry. ‘Hats tell stories,’ asserted milliner Sally Victor; Stewart aptly ensures the colorful story of their makers is also told.