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The Jewish Chronicle

Magical millinery? Thank Mad Men

It is impossible to ignore the influence that the 1950s and early 60s are currently exerting on trends.

September 3, 2010 10:00
Black fascinator, £345, Nerida Fraiman www.neridafraiman.com; bouclée jacket, Tara Jarmon, £359, Fenwick, W1

ByJan Shure, Jan Shure

3 min read

It is impossible to ignore the influence that the 1950s and early 60s are currently exerting on trends - big skirts, wide, waist-cinching belts, capes, hairbands, below-the-knee pencil skirts, soft blouses, nipped-waist jackets... Miuccia Prada may claim never to have seen Mad Men, but even if that is true (and the entire run has been shown on RAI's Channel 4, so surely she must have sneaked a peek, even if only in un momento debole, and been transfixed by the immaculately groomed Betty Draper and the gloriously curvy Joan Holloway), she has been a key player in taking the trends from half a century ago and translating them into perfectly wearable and desirable pieces for this autumn.

In doing so, she has (together with Mark Jacobs, John Galliano, et al) helped revive a period that, even a year ago, seemed so irredeemably unhip (teenagers hadn't been invented, girls went straight from dressing like, well, little girls to dressing like their mothers) that the notion that the clothing of the era could be cool would have been an offence leading to arrest by the style police.

And nowhere have those influences taken a grip as strongly as in what we will be wearing on our heads for synagogue this yomtov.

The millinery department of a store like Fenwick, Bond Street, where they have just removed the dust covers after a basement-to-roof renovation which has transformed it into a dazzlingly ritzy amalgam of Bergdorf Goodman and Colette, is awash with gorgeously on-trend hats which mainline the 50s and 60s. There are Jackie O pillboxes, stunning little head-hugging feather numbers, tall busby-like fake fur hats which could have been made for Audrey Hepburn or Grace Kelly, and those hard-to-wear, head-hugging hats that sit like super-wide headbands and come to a point above each ear - instantly familiar from 1950s images of a newly-crowned Queen Elizabeth in a Dior New Look-inspired fitted, big-skirted coat.