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 From 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 teach a graduate level class in it. 

But regarding this book: it’s great for an introduction to some of the still-available traditional materials, as well as materials used for wedding hats, and racing hats, plus a glossary of useful terms and suppliers, and pattern shapes for some of the popular styles these days.

There’s a chapter on blocking felt, which is particularly exciting to see, and then it’s kind of project based for people who want to learn to make hats for custom clients, primarily for weddings and races.

So I don’t think I will adopt this as a new class text, but I will add it to my reference library. Perhaps the next time I teach the class, I will consider creating a custom course pack with excerpts from many different reference books.

My one main criticism has to do with the graphic design of the book and the fact that they have chosen to use a small point font of grey text on white pages, and it is extremely hard to read. I say this as someone who has a low vision disability, so it might not be a problem for everyone.

The full color photographs of the different materials, media, equipment, and steps in the process of making the projects are clear and illustrative. 

Another constructive criticism is the homogeneity of the models wearing the completed hats, it seems to be all the same pale young British woman, and I wonder for an instructional text would have been better to just use featureless canvas heads or mannequins?

Overall, I am glad to add this to my reference library in the millinery studio.