Kate Middleton, Carla Bruni, and the Return of the Pillbox Hat

Sarah Mower


Kate Middleton
Kate Middleton

Putting aside the Catherine Walker & Co. red coat (so like something once worn by Princess Diana) and that accidental leg flash: Following yesterday's Descent From the Aeroplane, let us turn to investigate the Duchess of Cambridge's pillbox hat. It's by Gina Foster, a milliner who has a little shop in Kensington Walk, an alleyway in easy nipping-distance from Kensington Palace. (I checked this morning: There are no other pillboxes on display. This must have been a bespoke commission.)


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Now, I wonder about this hat. Quite obviously, we can't look at it without thinking Jackie O, although that terminology isn't quite right. Actually, it was a minimal compromise for a modern woman who didn't like the idea of millinery at all-Jackie Kennedy's answer to the exasperating requirement of wearing hats in public when she became First Lady in 1961. It was the 28-year-old genius Halston who made the hat for her (although designer Oleg Cassini would always claim the design was actually his) while he was the resident milliner at Bergdorf Goodman. "Oh dear, it was so pleasant when I didn't have to wear hats," Jackie wrote to Marita O'Connor, her personal shopper at Bergdorf. "They will pauperize me and I still feel absurd in them." (All this is to be savored in Simply Halston, The Untold Story by Steven Gaines, Putnam, 1991.)

Logic-not to say, empathy-has to suggest that Kate Middleton must be going through the same sort of millinery bother herself. Formal hat-wearing on public occasions is at odds with fashion-or, at least, completely outside its normal remit. How can a young woman still feel like herself with a thing on her head? The Duchess makes her own compromise with it by continuing to wear her long hair down, while keeping the peace with royal protocol by having the hat perched on top. That's where the difference between the Pillbox Now and the Pillbox Then comes in. It's the hair.


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For Jackie Kennedy, the pillbox was the perfect non-interfering sculptural extension to the back of her bouffant hairdo. It set a style in the early sixties (tracked in Vogue), which was also memorably worn by Audrey Hepburn (also with hair up) in Charade in 1963, (two versions, one white, one leopard, designed by Hubert de Givenchy). In fact, the fashion had already been established years before by Cristóbal Balenciaga and Christian Dior in Paris. But, as Halston himself realistically-and completely accurately-pointed out to The New York Times in 1962, "Fashion is never made by designers. Fashion is made by fashionable people."

Interesting to see, then, who's backing the pillbox today amongst "fashionable people" of the protocol-conforming classes. Carla Bruni-Sarkozy wore a gray Dior one (back of head, hair down) with a matching gray coat, when she visited the Queen as France's First Lady in 2008. Queen Máxima of the Netherlands coordinated a navy blue pillbox (hair down, back of head) with a navy Jantaminiau in November 2013. Will the Duchess of Cambridge have more of the kind packed for her three-week tour of New Zealand and Australia? Maybe not. But just think of the number of hatboxes that must be traveling with the royal entourage . . . .

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