Between the art and the mummies left behind by ancient Egyptians, we know a lot about how they wore their hair.  You probably have some pictures in your head already, like blue-and-gold striped pillowcase-looking thingies with snakes coming out of the forehead.  And stuff like that.  Right?  Well, there’s that and more.

Hairstyling was a big deal in ancient Egypt, for both practical and aesthetic reasons.  Tomb artwork depicts noblewomen with their hairdressers, applying cosmetics, bathing, and so on.  These people cared a lot about their appearances!

Your average Egyptian woman, up to the time of the New Kingdom (which started around 1550 BCE), wore her hair pretty short – either shaved or in a bob.   (more…)

A friend of mine recently donated her hair, and it got me thinking about long hair again.  But since I’ve done the topic of caring for long hair before, I went online and poked around to see what I’d find about long hair in terms of history and culture and society.  And I came up with some cool thoughts and facts.

It’s funny, what some people will consider long is really medium or short to others, depending on what the norm is where you live.  A girl with hair to her shoulders has medium-short hair, but a guy with the same length will be perceived as having long hair.   (more…)

It’s almost Thanksgiving once again, and as the black-and-orange decoration disappear from store shelves, they’re quickly being replaced with cornucopias and those big black buckled hats that we spoke of last November.  My previous turkey day post focused on Pilgrim fashion, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to mention some interesting Native American (or First Nations, or American Indian, or whichever term you feel is most descriptive) styles.  There are a LOT of styles to cover (for half a continent’s worth of people, so yeah), but here’s a rundown of the most commonly known, or otherwise really interesting-looking.

As I said last year, those big feathered head-thingies that you typically picture when you think of Native American clothing are war bonnets worn by Plains Indian men (Sioux, Comanche, and Cheyenne are some of the most commonly known Plains tribes), mostly for ceremonial occasions.  Feathers were added to a bonnet in honor of great deeds done in battle; in order to begin making one, a person had to earn ten such honors (more…)

When you picture certain people, you automatically dress them in certain clothes.  Think about the dress-up box in your kindergarten classroom – all those uniforms.  Wearing a uniform helps people recognize what a person does.  But how did we come to associate mortarboards with graduating students, or those tall white hats with chefs and bakers, and so on?

The first police uniforms were created in London in 1829; the first US police uniform was established in New York in 1853.  Those outfits were basically dark, plain versions of what most people wore back then. (more…)

When you think of a bonnet, you probably think of Laura Ingalls Wilder on the prairie, or little girls in fancy dresses with frilly hats.  Can you believe that they used to be the height of French fashion?

Well, maybe not the height, but certainly in style in various forms, for a good 150 years.  Technically, a bonnet is a brimless hat (hence the term being used to describe several hats that aren’t what you might think of as bonnets – particularly certain Scottish caps).  The predecessor to the sunbonnet were small caps worn to protect hair from dust and so on – similar to what might also be called a coif.  Early bonnets were very unstructured, and sometimes became more like turbans.

By the 19th century they began to take on more specific shapes.  They were made of both cloth and straw, and elaborately decorated with flowers and ribbons.   (more…)

The cloche hat is iconic of the 1920′s, but it is still popular today.  It is characterized by its bell-like shape (cloche is the French word for bell) and a close fit around the head.  Cloches can be made of felt or straw, and are worn low on the forehead.  They could be plain or elaborately decorated with ribbons, beads, applique, embroidery, jeweled brooches, or clusters of feathers.  A cloche’s brim can be worn down or, more typically, turned up.

They were first designed in 1908, but became wildly popular in the 1920′s, in the Art Deco fashion culture. (more…)

Straw hats are the perfect summer accessory.  They’re light, they shade you from the sun, and they come in every possible shape, size, and style.  And while they have a long history, they are anything but outdated!

Straw hats aren’t always made from straw, you know!  The term is applied to most hats made from woven or braided plant fibers.  Straw itself refers to the stalk of grain plants such as oat and rye. Other common hat fibers are sisal, raffia, rush, buntal, abaca, jute, seagrass, ramie, and toquilla palm (used to make those famous Panama hats).  These materials vary in color and texture, so they make a wide variety of hats. (more…)

Lace isn’t just for wedding dresses and baby bonnets, you know.  You can find it everywhere from lingerie to stylish clothing to home decor.  It doesn’t have to be white, and there are dozens different ways to make it.  If you’re into the romantic, feminine air that lace lends to wherever it goes, read on!

It’s possible that lacemaking goes back as far as ancient Rome, where tools that resemble those used in the craft have been found.  But we do know for sure that it became popular in medieval Flanders (that’s Belgium nowadays!), and spread from there all over Europe. Different places developed their own signature techniques (more…)

I’m planning ahead.  Snow is expected in my neck of the woods by Tuesday, which I’m hoping will translate into a Wednesday snow day.  That means I have two days to buy a sled and make sure my family has everything we need to stay warm.  And when it comes to warm headgear, no one beats the Russians.

You know those fur-lined hats with the earflaps that are getting more popular every year?  The style is known as the ushanka (plural: ushanky). (more…)

Everyone knows that the pilgrims who landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620 wore all-black clothing with white aprons and collars and big buckles on their shoes.  And the Native Americans they ate with on Thanksgiving wore big feather headdresses.  Duh.  Every picture you ever saw of them proves it!

Only, not.  If you actually visited Plymouth back then (or the Plimoth Plantation Museum today), you’d see people dressed in lots of colors, and shoes that slipped on or laced up.  Check out the photos below, of reenactors in authentic garb.  Info is courtesy of the Plimoth Plantation website.

It actually wasn’t that easy to dye cloth black back in the day, which meant that true black clothing was expensive, and saved for best.   (more…)

So, I hit my favorite good-weather outdoors event (I’ve mentioned it before) this past weekend, and it was fabulous.  The awesome thing about Renaissance Faires is that you can wear the wildest, wackiest outfits – or at least ogle people in them – and it’s totally ok.  You don’t have to be authentic, although people are more impressed when you are.  It’s the one chance a lot of people get to indulge in their romantic, old-fashioned, Gothic, Celtic, or witchy sides.  You can be anyone you feel like dressing as!

Of course, I made sure to inspect every clothing, jewelry, and (duh) hat shop or vendor that I passed.  Here’s a rundown of the most popular headgear styles you can get and wear at a Renaissance Faire.  They make excellent costumes for the rest of the year, and if you’re feeling adventurous, totally put one on and hit the mall. (more…)

There are so any different styles of Asian headgear that I had trouble picking just a few to highlight in this post; I’ll have to show you some more in the future.

When you think of Asian headgear, the first image that probably pops into your mind is the iconic conical hat.  Variations on this style were and are worn in China, Japan, Vietnam, and Korea in particular, and is known in other parts of East and Southeast Asia as well.  It provides protection from both the sun and rain, so it’s a genuinely practical style.  It can be made of straw, bamboo, or palm fronds a cloth band usually holds it under the chin, with a band of the same around the inside, where the hat rests against the head; this soaks up sweat and helps keep it in place. (more…)

Have you ever wondered where the names of different clothing styles come from?  Ok, some are pretty obvious, like bell-bottoms or straw hat.  But who decided that a sweater that fastens down the front should be called a cardigan?  Or that snood would be a good name for the crocheted thingy that women were tucking their hair into?

So, I put on my Googling gloves once again, and dug up some info on the origins of the names of different hat styles.  I bet you didn’t realize that some of them are derived from the names of people or places.

Take the fedora for instance; this brimmed hat that I described in a recent post was actually named after a woman – well, a character really.  (more…)

The Tudor dynasty reigned in England from 1485 to 1603.  Famous Tudors that you may recall included Henry VIII, who had six wives (of which he divorced two and killed two), and his daughters Mary (aka Bloody Mary) and Elizabeth (who hasn’t heard of Queen Elizabeth?).  This was a time when kings and queens and their hangers-on did their best to show everyone how important they were by dressing the part.  Their clothing was rich and opulent, and involved large quantities of expensive fabrics and trimming.  Big ruffs around the neck, huge skirts, lots of brocade and velvet – and lots of perfume to hide the stench from all the sweat that they rarely washed off. (more…)

In honor of Independence Day this weekend, I’m skipping ahead in our History of Headgear series to the late 1700’s, to take a look at the kind of things people like Martha Washington and Abigail Adams wore.  Before you break out your barbecue and sparklers, take a look at some of these styles.

Rich women who had the time and money to bother with elaborate hairstyles went crazy with piled lots of puff on top and curls at the sides – and the fashion was to powder it white for special occasions. (more…)

Does it really exist?

I don’t know about you, but I find guys to be very hard to shop for.  The first year I was married, I took my husband to Home Depot for his birthday and let him pick out a cordless drill; that was the only thing I knew he wanted, but there was no way I’d be able to find the right one myself.  I can always get him a new tie or cufflinks, but there’s a limit on how many of those he actually needs, since he only wears them once a week (unlike my tichels, for example!).

I like to be practical with gifts – I’m not going to get him a framed copy of some sappy ode-to-daddies poem, or a meat branding iron with his initials (just in case he gets his hamburgers mixed up with the neighbor’s?).   (more…)

You’re probably thinking of those weird pointy things that you associate with fairy princess costumes.  Well, so am I – see the bit about hennins below.  Here’s a run-down of some of the styles that were popular in medieval Europe (from around the 12^th century through the 16^th).  Click on the pictures in the gallery to see the whole thing!

• Chaperon – no, this does not mean a hat that accompanied children on class trips!   The chaperon started out as a hood with an attached cape that pulled over the head (hoods were really poular themselves).  Then people started making the tip of the hood longer (called a liripipe or tippet), and around 1300, they started putting them on so that what used to be the neck hole was now around the crown of the head, so that the tail and the cape were hanging down. (more…)

This post will be the first in an ongoing series about hair coverings around the world and throughout history.  If there are any styles you’re particularly curious about, let me know!  I randomly decided to start with snoods, because they go pretty far back.

Basically, a snood is a loose bag that covers some or all of the hair; they can be both functional (ever seen a chef wearing a hairnet?) and decorative.  The style goes back to medieval Europe, although they became really popular around the 1500’s.

The first snoods were made of hand-knotted lace and pinned or tied on; they were a pretty, practical way to cover some or all of a person’s hair.  Wealthy people decorated theirs with beads or even precious stones.  The term “caul” referred to snoods made of solid cloth like linen or silk, rather than net.  Crocheting became popular in the 1600’s.  Sometimes snoods were worn with other pieces of headgear, such as hats.

(more…)