The hat aspect

I mentioned school uniform the other day, and how fortunate I thought I was to have a fairly plain and simple uniform, skirt, shirt, tie, jumper and no hat. My sister went to another school and she had hats – one for summer and one for winter, totally impractical and silly looking things too! We moved schools, from the east to the west, and my poor sister, not only were the hats at this school even worse, but she had to wear a gym slip! If I’d stayed at my old school, sixth formers wore their own clothes, at the news school I was back to wearing skirt, shirt, tie, jumper, but at least once again I escaped the school hat!

I shared my uniform post on social media, and the hat aspect immediately struck a chord, and got me thinking about hats in general. When I was young, back in the Dark Ages, younger women like my mum and aunties didn’t wear hats when they went out and about, it was only grandmotherly figures who did. I had this “conversation” about it:

H: In addition to your sartorial torments we also had to wear a beret. A completely pointless and useless headgear. I too loved my duffle coat!
L:  I think berets had been a thing but fortunately I missed them! My poor sister at another school had to wear one of those cloche type hats and a straw hat in summer!
H: Lois Elsden that’s even worse. In Sunderland berets continued to be the scourge of schoolgirls for a while. Why?
L:  the age of hats passed in the 50’s for ordinary people, I never saw my mum or aunties ever wear hats except at weddings, it was only old ladies even then!
H: clearly Roker in Sunderland where I lived till I was 16 and left in 1967, was way behind the times. Men still wore caps. Women wore hats or more commonly headscarves. There’s a fascinating historical fact. We moved to Ipswich which when I think back only my mum and a few older women stubbornly stuck to hats! I didn’t wear a beret there doing A-levels.
L: Headscarves! I forgot headscarves! They were mostly tied under the chin, weren’t they, but some women made them into a sort of turban! Nowadays some people make a stupid (racist) fuss about Muslim girls and women covering their hair, whereas women of our mums and certainly grandmothers generation always did the same!!
H: Absolutely. I so agree. And some of those scarves were downright ugly and unflattering!
L: Gosh yes!
C: We used to hide our school berets under our back combed beehives, and we loved Brigitte Bardot headscarves, (with black eyeliner and white lipstick). Fortunately there are no photos to show how daft we looked but we had so much fun
L: Cathy I bet now you’d think how cute you looked not daft! Fashion etc rather passed me by, so I inadvertently looked just right with long hair and long coats and boots when I went to Manchester to do my degree!
C: Lois Elsden that sounds effortlessly cool!

My featured image is of my grandma on the right wearing a hat in the 1940’s/50’s when she would have been in her 50’s/60’s), she looks rather smart so maybe she and my aunty (in the middle) were visiting someone. But grandma didn’t always wear a hat, as you can see below in a picture from a visit to Eastbourne

I think the photo above is later than my featured image, they look a little less post-war!