Spring is just around the corner. Birds are singing. Trees that have been barren for months are starting to pop with color. And it’s getting warmer — a natural time of year to grab a cap as you head outside.
Chances are you’ll see plenty of folks donning similar headgear. But hats weren’t always so ubiquitous and utilitarian.
The Kings Mountain Historical Museum in Cleveland County aims to showcase that.
Late last month, the museum opened up an exhibit called “Hats Off!” It features hats from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, along with archived news articles and advertisements related to the history of headwear in the region.
“It’s really talking about how changes have occurred and examining the creation and evolution of hats, their symbolism, their style and how they’re all an expression of functionality and form,” said January Costa, the museum’s director and curator.
And most of the hats came from the museum itself. As Costa was looking at inventory on the museum’s archive software, she noticed a trend.
“When I was going through a lot of the stuff that we were pulling for another exhibit about a year ago, I just kept coming across all these hats,” Costa said.
Some of the hats hadn’t been photographed, so staff pulled them out of storage. When Costa saw the scope of the collection, plans for the exhibit began to form. There are 50-60 hats on display. Some of them were loaned the museum specifically for the exhibit, including one from Costa herself — a fedora that’s one of the few men’s hats on display.
That’s not intentional. Most of the hats that were donated over time just happened to be women’s hats. And because of that, Costa says the exhibit is a neat trip down an aspect of fashion for Women’s History Month.
Costa is quick to talk about how hats have evolved from their early recorded uses in ancient Egypt to the modern era. Over time, hats have been tools to shield people’s faces from the sun or keep people’s heads warm. But they’ve also been used as status symbols. And Costa says the museum wanted to show how hats have changed in response to social conditions.
“During the Civil War, for example, you had what we call mourning bonnets,” Costa said, describing black hats with black veils that often wereworn in tandem with other black clothing. “People would mourn a death with their clothing, and the mourning caps were something that evolved, and the bonnets became popular, just in general, in the 1800s, because they would sort of close your face and kind of keep you so that men wouldn’t be able to see your face as much and leave you alone.”
Of course, there’s also the element of telling the story of people in the Kings Mountain area. Styles change through the industrial era, the art deco era and the gilded age. Technology allowed for the mass production of hats over the last couple of centuries.
And for women, especially, Costa said, hats became a form of expression in the early 1900s.
“Women are finding themselves — you’ve got your suffragists, women’s rights; women are doing more stuff,” Costa said. “That really opened up a whole realm of hats and designs that were going to be coming out.”
In the post-World War II era, hat trends changed again, with ultimately fewer people wearing them in the late 1940s and 1950s, Costa said. But the 1960s saw a bit of a resurgence in statement hats.
“With Jackie Kennedy, her famousphoto in the Halston hat really made the pillbox hat popular among young women,” Costa said. “So that became the fashion, and women moved into wearing those. They wanted to copy this icon. All of these have to do with a lot of the social stuff going on, which I found extremely interesting. That affects the whole world.”
And that era is around where the “Hats Off!” exhibit cuts off.
“It became about fashion in the 1960s, but then it became something that wasn’t as necessary,” Costa said. “You know, women would wear them to church or special functions. But the everyday wearing of hats just wasn’t an etiquette thing that was accepted anymore.
“And now, if somebody wears a hat, it’s like a ball cap to keep your hair out of your face or the sun out of your face. Now they serve a lot of the ‘function’ purposes.”
Costa, who has an archeology background, likens the exhibit to pulling something out of the ground and piecing together its meaning. Archaeologists, she said, have to discern how one item fits into a bigger picture.
The displays include stories about who owned some of the hats and even sales in the area over time.
“It’s not just coming to an exhibit that’s just got a bunch of hats on display,” Costa said. “You can come in and actually learn how it humanizes all of these hats.”
“Hats Off! A History of Headwear” is on display at the Kings Mountain Historical Museum through May 14. It’s free to visit, and there’s more information atkingsmountainmuseum.org.
