The History of the Iconic Cloche Hat: Making 1920s Fashion

Hello everyone and welcome back. The cloche hat is probably one of, if not the most ubiquitous fashion item of the 1920s. Whenever we see the 1920s represented in modern media, cloche hat. But was it really as popular as we make it out to be? That's the question that started me on this entire journey because I realized not only do I not know the answer to that, but I also don't know when the cloche hat came in, why it did, how popular was it, how long did it last, why did it stay so popular if it did, what took it out in the end. And in reality, what is a cloche hat? I honestly don't know the precise definition to it. Though I have this as my mental image for a cloche, maybe that's not all it is. So I started digging into the references of the 1920s. I started in the middle of the decade to see if they talked about where the origins came from. Most said that it became incredibly popular in late 1922. However, as I looked back at 1922, I found plenty of references to cloches. Then I went back to 1921, still found plenty. 1920, 1919, just kept going further back and further back and eventually reached the point around 1906, 1907, where I was finding a few references, but really wasn't finding many before that. So at that point, they were referring to a cloche shaped hat as something that didn't have the flat square style crown that say the sailor hat did, or the little flat hats that perched upon the head. Instead, it had a much higher crown that was arched. Because cloche in French, which is its origins, means bell. So this is a bell shaped hat. But in this era, hair was particularly large. And most of the time, hats sort of perched upon it. And you would use hat pins in order to keep it in place and keep it from moving. So as the cloche shaped crown became a cloche shaped hat, and suddenly there was this very large bell that was meant to fit down over the hair. There were very large hats. These are not petite like we think of the 1920s styles. These are not tiny hats. These are massive. They have tons of trim and access to them, and they are huge in order to fit over that big hair. So it's not surprising that they were not as universally acknowledged in this time, that some really loved the hat and others, not so much. They thought it was very difficult for a lot of people to pull off. So they were around in some format. But the cloche hat of the early 1900s and early 19-teens seems to be more in reference to the fact that it is bell shaped. That is a rounded, taller crown. Sometimes it leads into a sloping brim that looks even more like a bell. This hat really sunk its teeth in, though, in the mid-19-teens. By that point, the hair had deflated quite a bit. In fact, the hairstyle of the 1915-1916 range was pretty slim around the sides of the head, but fairly tall on top. You didn't want to put a hat over it. That squashed it. So the cloche was the perfect option for that. It fits snugly around the sides of the head now, as it had deflated with the hair, and would hold itself there while giving enough space on top for the hairstyles. So it became a fairly popular style pretty quickly around this time. It is by no means the universal hat style of the mid-19-teens. It is just one of many. And not all hats that have that shape were called a cloche hat, and not all cloche hats had the same shape. This is where it starts to get exceedingly confusing very quickly. Because though they reference the fact that these hats were immensely popular because women were playing sports, and just generally being much, much more active than they had been in the past, and needed hats that fit well with that, that weren't fussy and difficult to manage, and could keep up with all of the levels of movement and activity that they were having, this didn't mean that only one hat style worked. And the cloche, which you can find mentioned over and over again on all of these pages of hat examples, can be so many different things. It can be somewhat bell-shaped, but it can also have a very wide flat brim. It can have a bit more of a square top to the crown rather than a rounded one. It can have pleats and tucks, and just a variety of different proportions to it. So there's not one singular cloche hat as we're rounding into the early 1920s. Though they are growing very quickly in popularity, and more and more things are being referenced as cloche hats, there's not a definitive answer as to what it is. In fact, I never came across a detailed description of what is a cloche hat. They occasionally will mention that for the season or for the moment they are fitted tightly about the head, or they are low at the brow and cover one of the eyes, or come low over the eyes, that they are fairly tall in the crown, or medium in the crown, or that right now they have small brims, or large brims, or soft tops, or hard tops, or very little brim in the back and only in the front. It changed year to year, season to season. In reality, the biggest definitions I found were in comparison to other hat styles. So in comparison to the capoline, in comparison to the sailor hat, in comparison to the other popular styles like the beret or the tam, or a whole host of other different name styles, which were very often touted to dethrone the cloche and take over as the popular hat, but they never really did. They might be popular with one age group or one season, but they never really took hold the same way that the cloche did, because it properly did. Not only did it start being immensely popular as of 1915-16 and growing and growing and growing until, yes, we reached that 1922 point, and they are just absolutely everywhere. So they weren't invented by any means in that year, but they were immensely popular as of that point, and they continued to be throughout the 1920s. There's just a constant stream of cloche styles. They do, however, even by 23, recognize the fact that cloche is fairly undefined, and that in reality, tons of different styles of hats are out there vying for popularity. They're all just variations on the one style. Even if they don't want to call themselves by that name, and they come up with a completely new definition and say they're the newest, most novel, and creative thing, it's just a cloche by a different name. And they recognize that that's one of the reasons why the cloche is so hard to unseat as a popular item, in the fact that even if you're buying something that doesn't call itself a cloche, it still looks pretty much the same. So it's the style that is the most functional, and that's why it is stuck around. It's not just a matter of does it look good with the clothing, that's of course part of the concern, but it's the matter that it doesn't bother the hairstyles. The 1920s, the bob, the shingle, and the variations thereof are the big thing. In fact, one article I came across called it the bingle as a combination of the two, and I don't know why, but I'm deeply uncomfortable with that term. I don't know, something about it. But those hairstyles required hats that weren't going to crease them or swoosh them, and that's what the cloche did. And that, and the practicality of activities and sports, meant that it stayed a popular style throughout the 1920s, even if it wasn't well defined. And as we move into the 1930s, they do start mentioning the cloche in a past tense. Rather than saying it is the thing that is popular, they say it was the thing that is popular. But they also acknowledge the fact that there isn't anything to replace it. There is not one single hat style that everyone is wearing like they used to. They also recognize that plenty of more conservative women are still wearing things like a cloche, and that the hat styles that are popular then are basically just evolved cloches. They have changed enough to no longer be a cloche, but they really haven't changed that much. And it's definitely true. When you look at early 1930s hats, it's kind of like you took a cloche and cut off part of it, so it's now just tilted to one side. It's not that dramatically changed just yet. So this more fitted style was what was needed for the hairstyles of the era, what was needed for the fashions of the era, and what was needed for the daily activity life. And the fact that it wasn't just one style in particular was what made it so successful. Its ambiguity is what led to its name being used over and over and over again. There were so many different styles meant for so many different outfits. If you were wearing a suit versus a coat versus a formal tea gown, they all required different variations on the same cloche. In fact, one hilarious article from 1928 talks about the famous fashion murders of the year, where the first story is about a lady who shows up late to lunch, rushes into the restaurant so she does not have her coat removed at the door as she should, and upon sitting down, the staff comes over, helps her remove her fur coat, to which everyone is horrified to realize that underneath she is wearing a simple but stylish brown suit. And now her hat, which has a very large trailing plume underneath her chin, is just far too dramatic to be worn with such a simple and tailored piece. That she is committing a fashion murder. She is horrified as she realizes the entire room is staring at her, she knows what she has done wrong, so she leaps up, runs out the door, and disappears. The fashion police, they basically say, show up at her door to arrest her, and she is wearing a much plainer, simpler cloche hat at the time, and both she and her maid testify that she has never owned such a hat. She would certainly not wear it out if she did, unless she had the most formal of afternoon tea gowns for it to be worn with. Everyone's just making things up. And of course, this is not a real story, but it really exemplifies how one style is not just one style. The cloche is many different things, many different circumstances, many different trimmings, many different levels of formality, depending on the way that it's trimmed, what it's made out of, the colors, so many different things. Which is what has led me to the perfect circumstances for what I need to do for my trip. I am planning on making three different styles of hats for my outfits. I also have a wide variety of crocheted pieces, such as tams and berets, that my mother has been so kind as to spend her extra time making for me as well. When it comes to the felt-shaped style of hats, I'm doing three of those. I'm starting off with a very simple, very common style in black that has a flat medium brim. I have seen this style rendered over and over and over again as sort of the universal, uh, I-don't-know-what-to-draw-with-this-fashion-plate, put-this-hat-on-it. So I'm doing that. It's going to have a variety of different trims, which I'm hoping will actually be interchangeable. Then I'm also doing a greenish-gold hat that is specifically based around this trim piece that I acquired many years ago and have always wanted to use. I think that will go perfectly with the black, with the green, and with anything that's more in that yellow tone range. Just a really universally interesting color, and the style will have to work well with that trim. The brim is also going to be smaller, folded up, so that way it is not dealing with the winds and breezes as much as the black hat inevitably will. Maybe not the most practical for a cruise ship, but I'm doing other things too, so it's fine. And then the last is going to be a dark red, which is really specifically meant to go with the suit that I have, that is the dark red tweed. That's a little bit later in style, more 1924 rather than 1921, so I'm going to go with a smaller, more fitted style of a bit more traditional cloche, I guess. Essentially what we imagine as the cloche hat. So the interesting thing here, though, is because it really exemplified how universal the cloche style is, I'm going to be using the same basic hat block for all three of them, which means that there will be some variations in terms of how much of it I use, and if I'm pleating parts up or squishing them around, but we're going to have three theoretically fairly different hats coming off of one very plain and basic hat block, which is great because I don't know if you know anything about hat blocks, but they're hard to find and they're really expensive, so having just one really plain one that I can make a variety of things off of sounds like a great place to start. Starting off with all three of the hats, I decided to try wetting them down with essentially boiling water to start, rather than just steaming the heck out of them like I had done previously. This made them definitely more malleable, though I had to be wary of the hot water. In no small part this is because I wanted to make it a much faster process than the previous hat that I made earlier in this year. All three of them are going to be using the same hat block, so I needed the process to go pretty quickly. Granted, when they are fully wet down like this, they do take a fairly long time to dry, but I am in the desert and it has been about 100 degrees outside this whole week, so they dried pretty quickly. With the black hat, I didn't wet down all the edges, but when I worked on the red and the olive hat, I did. Those needed to be fully stretched out all the way. I gave plenty of height to stretch down. I not only needed the crown shape, but I needed the brim shape to be flattened out. I didn't need a broad, flat, wide brim. I also put a tailor's tape around the bottom of the crown for each one of them. Some of them were higher up than the bottom of the hat block, and this would make sure that it was snug, wasn't going to stretch. I used the steamer to sort of shrink up and give some sections a little bit more malleability as it was drying, and made sure keep tugging down, because the more you create length, the less width you will have. The black hat had mostly dried. I popped it off of the hat block. This was something that was shorter than the hat block, so I needed it to come off in order to create this large, flat brim. Again, working with the steamer and using my brush as a flat pace, I worked out that edge the best that I could. For the other two, they were being shaped on the hat block. So the olive hat, I knew I wanted it to flip up in front and back, and sort of pull down in the corners on the sides. So I started off by figuring out where I needed it to crease and flip up, getting a general idea of the shape, and then I could start pinning things into place, clipping things into place, pulling and tugging. You can see I pulled the edges down and out so they weren't as wrinkled as they looked earlier, and I pinned and clipped into place the little corners, so that way they were in the correct places. Just kept sort of working it out until it was fairly smooth. This was not something that I was going to leave fully intact, so I started putting in pins where I knew my cutting line should about be, and I was able to start trimming away that extra edge close to the pins, so that way I didn't have to worry about the wavier edge not cooperating and not looking as nice. When it came to the red hat, I wanted to try something different, so I pinched up the very top of the crown right where the curve stopped, and I clipped that into place, so that way it sort of has this little ridge and gives it a slightly more squared off shape, I guess. It was something that I did see a few examples of in magazines. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with the brim yet, and so I started playing around with flipping it up and back and front, maybe giving a little bit of a corner in the front, but I knew overall the brim was just way too large for anything that I did want to do, so I went ahead and trimmed off an inch or so around all of the edges, so that way I could start molding it a little bit more easily. I got rid of a lot of the extra weight and bulk, and I ended up going with an asymmetrical style that was just brought up on one side, so it slopes across the face and the back of the head, which I knew was going to not only be, I think, fairly flattering for what is an asymmetrical hairstyle that I have, but also was going to work with some of the trim that I wanted to do. So I just stuck little pins in to make sure that it stayed upright while I was working on it. I decided to use some tailor's tape around what I was looking at for the edge, because it was getting really wavy, and it wasn't looking smooth, but I didn't want to trim everything away yet, because it was going to be a fairly short brim, and I was a little afraid to trim all of that away, so I used the tailor's tape to make sure that it was straight and flat the whole way around. Once each hat was dry, I went ahead and put a layer of hat stiffener, a shellac, on before I removed it from the hat block, with the exception, of course, of the black hat that was already off the hat block, but was fairly stiff already. The black one is a fur felt versus these other two, which are a velour felt, so there's a little bit of difference in texture and weight between the three of them. Once the shellac had dried on the outside, then I pulled the hat off and worked from the inside. One of the issues with shellac that you can find is if you build it up too much and it dries, it can crystallize and sort of look like little white bits. You can get them out with heat, but it's better to do a lot of the work from the interior, so you don't have to worry about that as much. I then went around and started trimming back all of the edges precisely, measuring out the black brim, making sure that the brims on the other two hats were exactly where I wanted them. At this point, once the shellac is dry, I can actually try them on my head, make sure they're good to go. For the black hat, I knew that since it's a broad brim, it needs some wire around the edge, so it has millinery wire that is whipped over the edge and covered up with a petersham ribbon that's stitched over it. For the other two hats, I didn't want ribbon along the edge, so instead I went and sanded down the edges so they round it off a little bit, they have the same fuzz that the rest of the hat does, and they don't have this hard cut edge with a color change straight in the middle. Then it's time for all of the trimmings. When it comes to both the olive and the red hat, they're going to have their trimmings stitched on, whereas the black hat is actually to have an interchangeable set. So these are just pretty loosely stitched on. The visual inside won't matter because I will be lining all of these hats, so everything just needs to look good from the exterior. Of course, dealing with hats that aren't perfectly straight up the sides is a little bit complicated when you go to wrap them. In the case of this silk, it did take a little bit of easing and not quite gathering at the very top, but definitely some extra work to get it flat and properly in place. Once all the trim is on, though, it's time for the linings. I just cut out an oval that was about the right shape for the top, and then a strip of fabric was gathered to it. I pinned this in so that way I knew at what depth it needed to be, then worked the petersham ribbon around the edge for the hat band. I chose to do it this way so that way the lining is exactly the right size for the interior of the hat, not too big, not too small. These are meant to fit really close to the head, and I didn't want to risk that. I am going to be stitching the petersham ribbon directly to the lining at the top edge, so I moved pins over and machine stitched that, and now I can trim back the lining so it won't show out from underneath the petersham ribbon. So this is a fairly quick way to do it. Some of my originals actually are glued together instead, or shellacked together, but that didn't really seem like the easiest option for me. In this case, stitching is far easier in my opinion. Once everything and the lining is together, though, it just gets whipped into place. That's why I'm using a curved needle here, so I don't go all the way through the exterior. you