I’ve never been much of a hat person, but. . .

I’ve been saving photos from the Swedish Roots website, and I’ve categorized a lot of them so I can use them for blog posts. If you’ve read “The Higher the Hair”, “Pull Up a Chair”, “These Boots”, or even “Mad About Plaid”, you’ll know what I mean. I recently saw a vintage photo on WordPress of a little girl with wearing what is possibly an Easter hat. So I decided now would be a good time to do my “hats” post.

I don’t have many photos of my female “predecessors” wearing hats, but the ones I do have are primarily from the Nelson-Detlie side of the family. The photo on the left shows my grandmother, Edla (Nelson) Johnson, with a pretty basic hat and a long fur coat. I’m guessing it was taken in the early 1920s. The other photo shows Edla’s mother, Charlotte, on the right, with an unknown friend.

Above: Edla Nelson (front left) and some other ladies with hats on. Below: Stengrim H. Detlie, Edla’s stepfather, pictured here with Charlotte and their children, Margaret and Harry.

With the possible exception of Charlotte and the other lady in the snow, their hats were dressy, but not too extravagant. Apparently, the same financial constraints or “no-nonsense” personalities that kept them from having high and fancy hairdos also had an effect on their hat wearing habits. There were no ostrich plumes or piles of flowers for us, I guess. But it’s still fun to look at what other Swedes were wearing.

We’re going to start with Hilda Bergström, whose name, according to Swedish Roots, was written on the back of her photo. There was no more information entered about her. I can only assume she had a fair amount of money. Was she someone famous, even? I found a Swedish actress named Hilda Borgström, on Wikipedia, from roughly that time period. She was from Stockholm, which is where this photo was taken, so it could be. I looked on Ancestry and found some pictures of her on FindAGrave.com. but I can’t really tell if it’s the same person in the Swedish Roots photo. I do know that you could get CDV photos of famous people to collect back then, so we’ll leave it to our imaginations.

Not to be outdone, this lady has a hat with a huge ostrich feather and what looks like some fancy ribbon. Here’s a quote from an article I found about the part ostrich feathers have played in fashion over the years: The Victorian era saw a surge in popularity of both real and faux ostrich feather products such as hats, bonnets, fans and boas. Richly embellished items featuring elaborately arranged feathers became associated with wealth and status amongst high society women. (Click on the quote to see the whole article.)

Speaking of ostrich feathers, this one is a little “different”, but to each her own.

This one was labeled “Elin with hat”, and you can see someone wrote “1914” on the front. What I like about Elin is that she has a pretty practical look about her (maybe it’s the pince-nez) but at the same time she wasn’t averse to wearing a semi-fancy hat.

I named this one “Extra huge hat”. I can’t tell what it’s made out of, but it’s pretty big. I wonder how her husband liked (paying for) her choice in headwear.

In 1906 in Coffeyville, Kansas, they were having a sale at Wells Brothers department store. A quick look at an online inflation calculator shows that each of the “50 White Trimmed Hats” for $2.50 would have cost the equivalent of $88.83 today. The “25 Pattern Hats from N.Y,” priced at $4.00 would be $142.13 each.

In this 1900 ad from Rochester, Minnesota, they were selling “pattern hats” valued at $15 for a mere $9. It’s hard to believe, but according to the inflation calculator, that’s like getting a $571.07 hat for $342.64. Somehow, I can’t see Johannes Peterson springing for even the sale price so his wife Petronella or his daughters could wear one of those to church.

And speaking of church, all you have to do is search “hats in church” on Newspapers.com for the years around 1890-1900 and you will find that during that time there was a huge controversy about whether or not women should wear hats in church. In 1900 an article came out in Kalamazoo, Michigan where they interviewed various women for their opinions on the subject. I found some of what they had to say amusing, and some of it was pretty logical. The title was “That Love of a Bonnet”, and you can read the entire thing here.

I can see the point of the “anti-hats in church” proponents, as some of these hats were probably impossible to see over. I don’t know if the same issues were going on in Sweden at that time, but I doubt if you’d want to be sitting behind these ladies at any function where you needed to see anything.

These both look like really nice ladies to me. Their hats are cute but not overdone. They might even take them off in church if they were sitting in front of you.

I like the hat on the left, but I think I like the lace collar even more. I don’t really “get” the one on the right, because to me it doesn’t really match her outfit.

More ostrich plumes.

Here are a couple of others I don’t quite understand. I do like the plaid dress, though. Actually, if that white “blur” isn’t a cloud painted on the studio backdrop, it’s a feather, and then the hat makes more sense. The one on the right, if it was green, (and who knows?) reminds me of St. Patrick’s Day.

And finally, how would you even keep a hat this size from falling off the minute you turned your head?

Behold, the lowly hat pin! Along with silk flowers and ostrich plumes, hat pins were big business. In this 1903 ad from Brooklyn, you can see they could be porcelain, sterling silver, gun metal, gold plated, and more. They could be adorned with beads, pearls, gemstones or rhinestones. A quick run through the inflation calculator shows that the cheapest ones at this store were seven cents (the equivalent of $2.54 in 2025) all the way up to $1.25 ($45.43).

But just as there was a controversy over hats in church, there was also one over pins in hats. Because they were so long, with the sharp end often sticking several inches out of the hat, some considered them deadly weapons. The article above was printed in the Ann Arbor News in 1911. To learn more, you can read it here.

Legislation to ban them was introduced in major cities throughout the world. Some women were outraged at being told what accessories they were allowed wear. Still, people were accidentally injured by them, and some women relied on them as instruments of self-defense. It all sounds like a pain to me, and regardless of how pretty the hats were, I think most of us today can say we’re glad all that’s over with!