The Sweet Pea Hat

I like looking at and bidding on online estate auctions, but I am not very successful when I bid. No mystery why: I’m cheap, I’m hesitant to pay up on items I haven’t seen in person, and I’m often interested in only one or two items in a lot. A while back I blogged about winning a lot of four hats at an estate auction, including the blow-by-blow of my bidding strategy. I won the bidding because there was one hat I felt I absolutely had to have—this light purple hat with sweet peas.

Sweet peas are a very sentimental flower for me. They remind me of my grandmother, whose house had a large patch of wild sweet peas growing by the driveway and who also grew the (what I called “tame”) kind in her garden. When we would visit in the summer, she would have vases of them on her large dining room table that sat on the linoleum rug. They would perfume the whole room. (I inherited three of my grandmother’s hats: her white pillbox,  her navy pillbox,  and her cello straw hat).
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My mother liked sweet peas very much as well, perhaps because they reminded her of her mother and of her childhood home.  She gave me this sweet pea mug when I was a young adult, and I still cherish it. I also love sweet peas and buy them whenever I see them for sale at the farmer's market.

So you see, I HAD to get this sweet pea hat. I have never seen another hat decorated with that particular flower (for contrast, I have at least ten hats with roses on them). The sweet pea hat felt like fate. That feeling led me to bid enough to secure the entire hat lot.
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This hat is from the company of one of the foremost milliners of the twentieth century, Mr. John (born John Pico Harberger). Early in the century, he and his partner’s company designed hats for the movies, including those worn by Vivian Leigh in Gone with the Wind. After he split with his business partner, he continued to design hats for the movies, including the ones worn by Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.  In my research, I only found that he designed Marilyn Monroe's hats, but I would hope he did Jane Russell's too. From this angle, the red hat looks like the iconic 1950's platter hat, but if you watch the whole scene you can see it's conical, not flat. And look at the feather on Monroe's hat! This hat also has a cute shape; it's a small halo hat, as you can see when you watch the scene and see the back.

Mr. John hats in Genlemen Prefer Blondes

Mr. John's 1993 New York Times obituary stated that, "in the 1940s and 1950s, the name Mr. John was as famous in the world of hats as Christian Dior was in the realm of haute couture.” Because hats fell out of style, he is not as well-known now as he deserves to be. The declining sales caused Mr. John to close his business in 1970, though he went on designing hats for favorite customers.

This sweet pea hat probably dates from the sixties based on its shape and label (Mr. John Jr., signaling it had a more youth-oriented look). 

His hats were known for being lightly embellished, with the real emphasis being on beautiful and flattering shapes, and if you google “Mr. John Hats” you will see a collection of very tasteful and timeless designs. I’m extremely happy to have this one.