Orienteering - not the sporty kind

As predicted on my post "Hat Hair" I am now fixated on small "New Look" style hats. Soooo predictable me!
The fancy ones are sometimes called a cocktail hat or "Juliet Cap" and these often have wire on the inside so you can manipulate them to clamp onto your head. They are surprisingly easy to wear because they don't get in the way. They look like this:

Now that I am hunting for them on esty and ebay, I see an extraordinary number of them displayed the wrong way around, which makes it hard for shopping! So I thought I might share some basics of hat orienteering.

If any hat has a label on it, then that will go at the back. So for this one, that means that the plainer, flat pleated velvet bit is actually on the front. This makes sense as 50s ladies often had shorter cropped hair dos with lots of lovely height or curls at the front and a Juliet cap would be worn at the crown (towards the back, not the front) of the head to show the hair off. Quite often, but not always, this will mean that the decoration - a bow, feather, or a cluster of flowers, might be at the back of the head or the side, as it would be seen more easily there.

If there is no label, then the grosgrain ribbon that runs around the inside is the best clue. Where it joins or overlaps is the back of the hat. I have only met very few hats with no ribbon at all, in which case, you can experiment and will probably find that it is molded in such away to accomodate the lumpy crown part of your head. When I say lumpy, you know what I mean eh?

There is a bit of chat about hats going on right now so you can also pop over and read about hat pins with Solanah, and more hat hair style ideas with Charlotte. I have a second post (this was getting too long) about keeping them on coming right up too.

Shona x