Bloomingdale's feather hat

ca. 1960

Guinea hen feathers, velvet, textiles

Overall: 7 × 12 × 13 in. (17.8 × 30.5 × 33 cm)

Gift of Anne Single

2021.20

This hat was made for Bloomingdale’s New York around 1960 by an unknown manufacturer. The hat shows one of the ways in which milliners and hat manufacturers adapted to the Federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which prohibited the hunting and use of exotic birds and their feathers. Feathers have signified status, provided decorative flourishes and creature comforts, and have symbolized connections with the spirit world for many hundreds of years. The fashion for feathers reached a peak during the late nineteenth-century, when game and commercial plume hunting, along with the vogue for wearing birds, wings, or feathers, decimated many avian species and threatened them with extinction. Devastation of bird populations alarmed environmental activists and galvanized them to campaign for federal controls. These campaigns, often spearheaded by regional Audubon societies, reversed the dismal future faced by many bird species and culminated in the passage of the groundbreaking Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 – one of the first federal laws to address the environment – which outlawed the hunting, killing, trading, and shipping of migratory birds and imposed important regulations on the nation’s feather and millinery trades. With passage of the law, New York’s millinery trade vowed to cease importing, manufacturing, purchasing, and selling migratory and song bird feathers and parts in a Feather suppliers and milliners found alternative materials for decorating hats, including feathers from domestic birds and fowl such as pigeons, doves, sparrows, peacocks, turkey, geese, and hens. American women often wore hats when venturing outdoors up until the early 1960s. This fashionable hat examplifies the types of stylish millinery that wealthy and middle-class American women wore during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

DescriptionHat with woven, straight-sided, circular cap and rounded crown, decorated across show surface with spotted Guinea hen feathers; cap brim trimmed with velvet; velvet bow affixed at center-front. Cloth label sewn into base of hat underside: “Bloomingdale’s / New York”.

ClassificationsCLOTHING AND FASHION

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