Let me tell you the story of Mom’s Doree hatbox. In 1973 my father’s bad taste led him to buy my mother a makeover session at Elizabeth Arden’s Red Door at 919 N Michigan Ave on the Magnificent Mile. Mom, secretly insulted, steeled herself for disappointment. Boy howdy, that’s what she got. Formerly a light brunette, she came home as a raven-haired Carmen with red lips and Beehive.
Elizabeth Arden, born Florence Nightingale Graham, opened her first salon in 1910. She pioneered creating an exclusive place where a woman reinvented herself. Many Chicago ladies made a monthly trip. Over the following decades, the Red Door Spa expanded to multiple locations across the United States and internationally, offering facials, massages, body treatments, and salon services that set industry standards. Mom, a practical woman who didn’t wear jewelry or makeup, didn’t buy any of it. Most women didn’t tire of finding new ways to transform, something Miss Arden relied on. Mom left the Red Door boiling mad after her 1973 makeover. For her next move she found herself a hat at nearby Marshall Fields. She picked a Doree of NY cloche that covered her whole head. I don’t have her hat, but I do have the Doree hatbox!
LM’s Hatbox Collection
Reader LM ALSO owns a Doree box, along with a desirable collection of other vintage hatboxes. Her Doree box, $48 at Etsy, is one of her favorites. In an era where lady’s accessories came advertised in pastels, the Doree box is arrestingly red, black and white. Other names to watch for are boxes from Leslie James, Don Anderson, and Claude St Cyr. LM owns elegant hatboxes, found at garage sales, thrift and estate sales, with whimsical themes from a more innocent era. Classic Paris scenes feature fashionable shoppers of bohemian Paris, and mustachioed gendarmes.
Hatboxes are today found for sale at prices I didn’t believe. I have formerly thrown many away: Gage Original $56, MCM Bagmaster with zipper $60, Knox NY men’s round box $48, Octagonal Coralie box $42, 1920s men’s Dobbs box $100, Resistal men’s 1940s $50, an 18th century wood box with brass hinges $200, a scoop top leather top hat travelling box $200, a 1930s flat bottom round train case hatbox at $60, a wig box train case $75, an eight-sided men’s Dobbs Fifth Ave New York box $48. You’ll never find vintage hatboxes in perfect shape because if they exist today, they’ve been through seventy-five plus years of protecting a hat.
Doree, company that created Mom’s cloche turban hat, worn in 1973 under duress, was a middle market commercial manufacturer (1940-1970 peak) creating good, crafted Fedoras, turbans, cloches, mushrooms, buckets, berets, sparkly cocktail, or net hats, and feather and fur hats. Felt could be wool felt or fur felt. Doree was a company, not a designer, like the New York Big Three: Mr John and his partner John Frederics (real name John Pico Harberger), the Christian Dior of hats 1940-50; designer for Gone with the Wind, Dietrich and Monroe. And French born Lilly Dache, the queen of NY draped turbans, and provocative half-hats. Halston started his career under Dache as Roy Halston Frowick before he became Halston, years before he burst into fame, with his Jackie Kennedy pillbox worn to JFK’s inauguration 1961.
The Other Queen of Hats
Sally Victor hatted first ladies Eleanor Roosevelt and Mamie Eisenhower. Hat and hatbox collectors missed Hats Off: Halston Hats from the Masterson Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. The exhibit featured Halston’s designs from his stint at Bergdorf Goodman—LM has a 1959 box. When asked “Why hats?” Halston said, “Sculpting hats taught me how to think about fashion in three dimensions.”
LM’s collection includes a Schiaparelli box, Italian boxes, London boxes, as well as I. Magnin, Lord & Taylor, and Saks recognizable signature styles. She also has a subsection of boxes that picture American cities: New York, Dallas, St Louis, Miami, and Memphis. But perhaps the overarching motif of LM’s hatbox show are those that reference charming Paris, such as the square City of Paris box from the San Francisco City of Paris Department Store, closed in 1972. She displayed her Paris boxes with that icon of French haute-kitsch taste, the French Poodle who also stars on figurines, compacts, purses, ashtrays, jewelry, and scarves. Not to mention that LM’s husband proposed with a vintage Eiffel Tower themed ring box!