Book Review: Contemporary Millinery
My reliable millinery textbook, Denise Dreher’s From The Neck Up, is out of print! It’s actually a good thing, that book is almost 50 years old at this point and half the materials it talks about are no longer in production or difficult to obtain in North America. Plus, it’s a good excuse to see what’s been published on the topic in the intervening time. The reason I loved F rom the Neck Up is because it specifically concerns theatrical millinery, which encompasses so much more than contemporary couture millinery (which I tend to think of as royal wedding hats and horseracing hats). Of course, there are also church hats, casual hats, historical styles, burlesque and showgirl headdresses, tiaras and crowns, and anything else that a costume designer decides a performer needs to wear on their head. So this has spawned a kind of existential crisis, forcing me to reconsider the scope of what theatrical millinery is in the 21st-century, and how I’m going to teac...
