Diane Hall

An elegant woman dressed in black and wearing an open-crown straw summer hat with a jaunty bow and gold high heels pulls hatbox after hatbox after hatbox out of her car.

“I have more, of course,” Diane Hall says, handing over armfuls of the huge, wallpaper-covered boxes. “In fact, my living room is decorated with towers of hatboxes—and they’re full.”

Hats. Hats. And more hats!

Balmoral bonnets. Berets. Bicornes. Boaters. Cloches. Cartwheels. Dolls. Pancakes. Pillboxes. Fez, fanchon, and flower pot. Some are plain, relying on their fine fabrics and lines for effect. Others are decked with artificial flowers, ribbons, bows, veils, half-veils, feathers, and/or faux jewels.

In the course of the afternoon, she’ll model these and many more, introducing them by showing elegant silk labels proudly proclaiming “Paris,” “France,” “New York,” “London,” and “Chicago,” along with the names of prestigious, long-gone city department stores, couturiers, and milliners.

A septuagenarian and retired IT specialist, Hall is also a genealogist, vintage dancer, dressmaker, more-than-amateur historian of fashion and films, and storyteller. She has a wealth of lore about family members and film stars and their triumphs and tragedies that otherwise would have faded into history.

“I have an appreciation for older things,” she says, opening the first hatbox with the look of a child opening a Christmas present. She studies her reflection in a mirror as she carefully positions a broad-brimmed black straw number on her shoulder-length white hair.

“My paternal grandmother, Vina (née Whitlow) Hall grew up on a farm in Tennessee, in a Southern Baptist family,” she says. “To her, women were supposed to be demure, modest, teetotalers, supportive of their husbands and families, and well-dressed. That’s how I was raised, by people two generations ahead of me.”

Hall moved to Ann Arbor in 1984; a divorcee with two small daughters, she was crafting a new life. She took an administrative job at U-M and from there trained in IT. She also discovered the Treasure Mart, a treasure trove of antiques and collectibles that long-time thrifters still mourn and miss.

“On my first visit, I picked up a hat there, and it reminded me of playing dress-up with my grandmother’s hats when I was a small girl. The memories came flooding back. Almost every time I went, I found elegant hats, originally very expensive, for six or eight dollars, and I couldn’t resist rescuing them.”

She began collecting in earnest and sewing outfits to match. “My Aunt Agnes had an MFA and always dressed marvelously,” Hall recalls. “She designed and sewed her own clothes, including matching coats, and she often covered her shoes with matching fabric. Of course, she wore hats and gloves and jewelry to complete her ensemble. She looked like a fashion model! I began having fun doing the same.”

Skeletal remains in ancient gravesites have been unearthed with identifiable traces of headwear. Throughout recorded history, they have served functions both practical and symbolic. 

For the average man and woman, hats kept the hair clean, the head warm, and sun, snow, and rain out of their eyes. For members of the upper classes, hats announced wealth, rank, and position—social, military, economic, and ecclesiastical.

In Western Europe and the Americas, Hall tells me, hats changed dramatically starting in the 1860s, when parasols were introduced. No longer did upper-class women need to worry about keeping the sun off their complexions and the rain off their heads. Freed from practicality, their hats became ornamental fashion statements, and remained immensely important to fashion-conscious women through the 1950s. Just when their use began waning, Jackie Kennedy brought the pillbox and veils back into style.

When churches stopped requiring women to cover their heads at services, many women consigned their Sunday headgear to a closet, or a shop like Treasure Mart. The feminist movement and a freer lifestyle further eroded demand for formal wear.

In this century, Kate Middleton—now Catherine, Princess of Wales––renewed public interest in head coverings with her hats and the ornamental headpieces called fascinators. “But I don’t regard fascinators the same way I regard a well-made hat,” Hall says, donning a favorite burgundy number with netting and feathers. (“Six dollars from the Treasure Mart.”)

Hall appreciates hats with particularly fine fabrics, shapes, or accessories. But her favorites are the elegant hats worn by actresses in her favorite classic movies.

“Audrey Hepburn is my all-time favorite, of course—no one can top her fashions in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I’m also fond of Myrna Loy’s doll hats in the Thin Man series. The hats reflect her film personality beautifully—sassy, frivolous, and up for fun and adventure.”

She also admires His Girl Friday star Rosalind Russell’s grand entrance into Cary Grant’s newsroom. She strides in, wearing an outrageous suit and matching hat, holding her head high. “With a hat and outfit like that, everyone knows she is supremely confident, the best at what she does.”

Hall “looked far and wide for a hat like that. And then I made myself a matching ensemble.”

On a summer evening years ago, she found a group of kindred spirits. She happened to be walking downtown when she heard 1920s music. Following the rhythms to the Bird of Paradise, a long-gone jazz club, she saw people dancing to the music her grandparents once played on the Victrola.

“A friend danced past the window and motioned me in. That’s how I was pulled into a vintage dance group—the Grand Traditions Vintage Dance. It changed my life! Suddenly everything—my love for hats, my sewing, my passion for fashion and dance—all came together.”

The group held a Christmas ball, a ragtime ball, and other events, and members were encouraged to dress in facsimiles of clothing from different eras. “I started really getting interested in period clothing then,” Hall says. She even traveled to Prague for a week of vintage dancing lessons. “Some of my relatives were from Bohemia, so the dancing, the music, and my family heritage were all bonuses when I was there.

“But,” she adds mournfully, “I don’t dance as much now—most of my friends were older than I am, and they’ve either died or they no longer dance.” Grand Traditions held its final event two years ago.

Hall lives south of downtown with her daughter Michelle, who works remotely for the U-M (and has her own hat collection). After serving in the army,  daughter Andrea is now home-
schooling her own two daughters in Saline.

Recently, Hall’s hat collection had its first public showing, when she was invited to give a presentation to the Webster Township Historical Society’s annual tea. The teenage waitresses had a marvelous time modeling.

“It was so much fun!” Hall says. And since then, “I’ve had other groups invite me to speak.” She is spending the summer researching and cataloging her collection in preparation for one at the Dexter Area Historical Society in October.

“To me, the rescuing and wearing of these hats is a way of paying respect to the people who wore them and their way of life. We owe them a share of gratitude as our forebears,” she says, reluctantly stowing her last treasure back in the last hatbox.