millinery

A milliner, in sixteenth-century English, was a merchant who sold goods imported from Milan. 'Milaner' or 'Millyner' was simply 'a person from or dealing in products from Milan.' Milan was Europe's fashion capital before Paris took the title. Milanese merchants exported ribbons, gloves, cutlery, and — eventually — hats. The hats took over the word. By the seventeenth century, a milliner was specifically a hat maker.

Millinery became a women's trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Female milliners designed, constructed, and sold women's hats. The milliner's shop was one of the few respectable business environments where women could work and sometimes own the business. The trade required artistic skill, knowledge of fashion, and the ability to manage clients. Milliners in London's Bond Street and Paris's Rue Saint-Honoré were tastemakers.

The hat declined in the twentieth century. Men stopped wearing hats daily after World War II — John F. Kennedy's bare head at his 1961 inauguration is often cited as a turning point, though the trend was already well underway. Women's hats shifted from daily necessity to occasional accessory. The milliner's trade contracted. A profession that had employed tens of thousands shrank to a few hundred specialists.

Modern millinery exists at the intersection of fashion and event culture. Royal Ascot, the Kentucky Derby, and British royal weddings demand hats. Philip Treacy, Stephen Jones, and a handful of other milliners maintain the craft at the highest level. The word millinery appears on their websites and in fashion magazines. It no longer appears on shop signs in most cities. Milan gave the word to hats. The hats gave it back to special occasions.