Edwardian Ladies' Hat Fashions

This history of Edwardian fashion takes the reader on a journey of the millinery trends and social history of the era.

With superb fashion color plates of the day, together with images of amazingly creative and colorful hat pins from both the UK and America, author Peter Kimpton shares the fruits of his forty years of postcard collecting of hats as worn by Edwardian women from over one hundred year ago. Kimpton also details the amazing life story of one of the worlds greatest fashion designers, Coco Chanel, as she set out on her lifetime of fashion in Edwardian Paris.

Reflecting on the darker side of Edwardian fashion, the book delves into the carnage that took place around the world, in which unscrupulous individuals from the Northumbrian coast in England to the Everglades in America, would callously slaughter whole colonies of birds (leaving their young to die) purely to provide the millinery trade with ornate feathers to decorate fashionable hats during that era. Discussing the world of millinery sweatshops of poverty stricken New York, Kimpton describes the conditions and deprivations under which the poorly paid workers, many of them immigrants, worked.

A detailed, illustrated history, Edwardian Ladies' Hat Fashions offers fashion and history enthusiasts a revealing look at the golden age of millinery.