A Closer Look at Mr. John

Am thinking today about hatmaker Mr. John, and how peculiar it is that this stellar designer from America's midcentury has fallen into near total obscurity. Perhaps if we all continued to wear hats as beautifully as Mad Men's Trudie Campbell does here his name would remain emblematic of all that was chic in the American style.

Himself a German with a background in medicine and art, John Pico Harberger came to the States in 1919 and set up shops in New York, Miami, and Palm Beach. Over his long, long career his most noteworthy achievements were designing the millinery for Scarlet O'Hara in Gone with the Wind, Marilyn Monroe in Some Like it Hot, and winning countless awards, including fashion's highest honor, the Coty American Fashion Critics Award. His clients included Greta Garbo, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, and the Duchess of Windsor.

As a dictator of style, he was a master of propaganda:

"A hat cannot actually give one golden curls if the hair is mouse-colored and stringy; it cannot lift a face, pay overdue bills, subtract ten years from one's age, or transform a plain soul into a reigning princess. But it can lend practically any woman a temporary out-of-herself feeling. For the right hat creates a desired mood, and that isn't fiction or fancy, but fact, fact, fact."

I suspect the man would be less than pleased to see his creations for sale on eBay, but so they are, and well undervalued they are too. Case in point: this ravishing feather toque, complete with a box that itself is so wonderfully evocative of its age and station.




I'd say a Mr. John revival is well overdue.

Anatomy of a Masterpiece III: The Headdress

For master couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga, the hat was just that. His adornments for the head were as meticulously conceived and executed as the wraps around the rest of the body. Each of his hats, assembled on the premises of his atelier by Mme Janine or Hélène, was designed to complement a specific outfit, so that the entirety of the look became a mobile sculpture.

Among his most dramatic hats was this wingspan creation of 1948. (John Galliano liked it so much he paid homage in Dior's Fall 2009 Couture line.)



Less dramatic, indeed rather introspective, is the velvet beret Balenciaga used to top off the suit below, from 1950. Perhaps he felt its soft folds and rather frivolous tassel provided a necessary antidote to the strict lines of the suit underneath.


It's possible, too, that his own self-image as an artist of cloth was coming to the fore--this style of beret is less akin to those worn by Balenciaga's Basque countrymen as that worn by another quiet genius, Rembrandt, in numerous self-portraits painted in his chilly northern studio.



(photograph top: Clifford Coffin for American Vogue, 1 April 1948. Photo of Dior Couture Autumn 2009 by Monica Feuidi/Gorunway.com/Style.com. Balenciaga suit photograph: photographer unknown, for Vogue, 1950. Rembrandt self-portrait 1634, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence)