{"id":81652,"date":"2015-01-15T15:30:58","date_gmt":"2015-01-15T20:30:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=81652"},"modified":"2015-01-15T15:48:48","modified_gmt":"2015-01-15T20:48:48","slug":"mad-hatter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/01\/15\/mad-hatter\/","title":{"rendered":"Mad Hatter"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"5334751971_4e3629c1e4_o\"<\/a>

From \u201cWacky Hats from Gay Paree,\u201d a fifties-era magazine feature.<\/p><\/div>\n

In the first half of the twentieth century, America experienced what might be called the \u201csilly-hats craze.\u201d Maybe it was the influence of the surrealists<\/a>, who were by then commercialized and nonthreatening. Perhaps it was a spate of postwar frivolity. Or maybe it was just a safe way to act out\u2014still conventional (no one was suggesting you actually go hatless!), but fun, wacky, and full of safely contained \u201cpersonality plus.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In this lineup of \u201cWacky Hats from Gay Paree<\/a>\u201d you can see the form at its most extreme. A search reveals atomic hats, hats made of lightbulbs, hats that look like flowerpots. Nothing was off-limits, and glossies delighted in featuring examples of millinery whimsy. <\/p>\n

But extreme millinery was not confined to the pages of magazines. Midcentury books on entertaining frequently contain instructions for silly-hat parties, and just such an event features in Beverly Cleary\u2019s YA book\u00a0The Luckiest Girl<\/em><\/a><\/em>.<\/em>\u00a0The gauche, thirteen-year-old Katie hopes to impress her crush by winning a wacky hats contest. To this end, she constructs a chapeau out of a head of iceberg lettuce and embellishes it with leaves of romaine and curly greens. But after the party, she returns home dejected, her hat wilted; her best friend Pamela has won the competition with a cute straw number featuring a wind-up toy monkey. Katie had not understood that the point was not to be truly<\/em> wacky, but to nod<\/em> at wackiness, while keeping your feminine decorum in tact.\u00a0<\/p>\n

My mother cherishes strong memories of a school fair that took place when she was in the first grade. Her own mother, my grandmother, came in as a parent volunteer and manned the crazy-hats booth. \u201cShe was so much younger and prettier than the other moms,\u201d said my mother, wistfully. \u201cAnd then she made this crazy hat out of a wool\u00a0felt pillbox, with a pipe-cleaner man on popsicle-stick skis, going down the side. I was so proud.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sadie Stein is contributing editor of\u00a0<\/em>The Paris Review, and the\u00a0<\/em>Daily\u2019s correspondent.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the first half of the twentieth century, America experienced what might be called the \u201csilly-hats craze.\u201d Maybe it was the influence of the surrealists, who were by then commercialized and nonthreatening. Perhaps it was a spate of postwar frivolity. Or maybe it was just a safe way to act out\u2014still conventional (no one was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[16631,20542,3543,538,9927,16630,16628,16632,14550,16629],"class_list":["post-81652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-beverly-cleary","tag-contests","tag-dress","tag-fashion","tag-hats","tag-millinery","tag-silly-hats","tag-the-luckiest-girl","tag-twentieth-century","tag-wacky-hats"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRemembering the Last Century\u2019s Craze for Silly Hats<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The first half of the twentieth century saw a lust for extreme millinery. 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