Tea at Trianon: Headpiece Renaissance

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, May 21, 2026

Headpiece Renaissance

Audrey Hepburn in profile

From Country Life:

Headdresses have been making, well, headline news, thanks in part to one of the UK’s most famous wearers of headpieces, Isabella Blow, whose biopic The Queen of Fashion is due out this year.
Issy, as she was known, saw them as not merely a fashion statement, but as an extension of her identity, famously saying: ‘I don’t use a hat as a prop. I use it as part of me.’
Their renaissance has also been fuelled by Instagram and a flurry of lavish country-house celebrations. At a party at Cornbury Park, Oxfordshire, home of the Howden family, headpieces were as central to the spectacle as the setting itself.
For the Narnia-themed event, the insurance magnate David Howden wore a spectacular Aslan-inspired lion headdress commissioned from the Canadian costume designer Maryam of Eastern Wind Studio by his wife, Fiona, who has long been a passionate hat collector and wearer of headpieces.
She sees them as ‘an opportunity to dress up as a character and add glamour, fun and theatre to events’. Her hat collection, sourced from street stalls in Venice, Italy, together with commissioned pieces, ‘makes great dressing-up material for my girlfriends and daughters’ — and for Royal Ascot, which David's company sponsors. Both David and Fiona were in the Royal Procession last year.
Hats and headpieces have long been regarded as little pieces of theatre, as well as signifiers of status in country-house circles. They acted as a kind of visual shorthand, announcing style, self-assurance and, occasionally, the scale of one’s estate. (Read more.)

Hat etiquette (a snob's guide), HERE.