Big Hats for Little People

I never imagined this red velvet 1920s hat would be so versatile when I bought it. It’s a cloche. It’s a Phrygian cap. It’s a gnome’s sugarloaf. And I don’t mean a miniature sweetbread baked by apple-cheeked little girl gnomes – the sugarloaf is anything but petite.

A sugarloaf is simply a pointed hat, and such headwear has been worn by a wide variety of cultures – including the gnomic of course – throughout history. It has landed atop the heads of whirling dervishes, been a travelling cap in Ancient Greece, a 15th century Burgundian noblewoman’s headdress of choice, a samurai’s ceremonial hat, the chapeaux of aristocratic kazaori eboshi, a dunce cap (because it stimulated learning in the 14th century), and the anointed, pointed sugarloaf of many a religious figure, from popes to Ottoman Janissaries.

And today it’s a gnome’s hat. How appropriate that it came from a milliner in Convent Garden.

In my research on girl gnomes I came across innumerable grotesqueries and countless kitsch tchotchkes, so here I am redressing the balance and shooting for cute. The silk embroidered blouse is vintage 1940s; the hat and apron are both relics of the 1920s; the 90s taffeta skirt comes out of my costume box (finally it has a use!); and the tooled red leather slippers are souvenirs I bought in Morocco. Cute, and just a little bit sweet.