Hat & Headwear Definitions — hats, caps, helmets and headwear terms from Apparel Search
A milliner is a hat maker. Hat-making, or millinery, is the design, manufacture and sale of hats and headwear. A person engaged in this trade is called a milliner or hatter, covering the whole process from designing a hat to making it and selling it to the wearer, and millinery shops are where hats made in this trade are found and sold.
A milliner is a hat maker.
Hat-making or millinery is the design, manufacture and sale of hats and head-wear. A person engaged in this trade is called a milliner or hatter.
Find millinery hat shops.
| The above article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/hatmaking 12/6/19 |
A milliner is a hat maker, and the short definition opens into a complete trade when its parts are separated. Hat-making, or millinery, is the design, manufacture and sale of hats and headwear. Design comes first: a hat begins as a decision about shape, size, material and trim, suited to a wearer, an occasion or a season. Manufacture follows, the skilled handwork of forming the hat, fitting its parts together and finishing it so that it holds its shape and sits correctly on the head. Sale completes the trade, because millinery has traditionally been a retail craft as well as a workshop craft, with hats offered directly to the customers who would wear them. A person engaged in this trade is called a milliner or hatter, and the two names cover the same work, so a search for a hat maker may use either term and reach the same kind of business.
The fact that design, making and selling sit inside one trade explains the character of the traditional millinery shop. A milliner who designs and manufactures what is sold can adjust a hat for the individual buyer in a way a seller of ready-made goods cannot, altering fit, trim or finish at the point of sale. That closeness between maker and wearer shaped how hats were bought in the centuries when a hat was a normal, expected part of dress for men and women alike: the customer chose a style, the maker produced or adapted it, and the finished headwear left the shop fitted to one particular head. Even the wording of the definition reflects that breadth, because hats and headwear are both named. A milliner's work is not limited to brimmed hats alone; headwear in its wider sense, caps, bonnets and other coverings for the head, falls within the same skills of shaping, fitting and finishing.
Having two established names for one trade can confuse a first search, so the relationship is worth stating plainly. Milliner and hatter both mean a person engaged in hat-making, and neither term changes the definition of the work: the design, manufacture and sale of hats and headwear. A business may present itself under either name, or under the plain description hat maker, without any difference in what a customer should expect to find there. Likewise the trade itself answers to two names, millinery and hat-making, and goods, shops and services may be labelled with either. Keeping those pairs together, milliner with hatter and millinery with hat-making, prevents the common mistake of treating them as separate crafts with separate products.
For anyone looking to buy, commission or learn about hats, the practical value of the definition is that it describes a full service in a single word. To find a milliner is to find someone whose trade joins the three stages that a hat passes through on its way to a wearer. A design can be discussed with the person who will make it, the making can be checked against the head it is meant for, and the sale is of a finished piece whose origin is known. That joined-up character is what separates millinery from simply retailing hats made elsewhere, and it is preserved in the definition itself. Whether the sign over the door says milliner, hatter or hat maker, the promise is the same: hats and headwear designed, manufactured and sold by a person whose trade is hats, from first shape to final fitting.
A milliner is a hat maker. The trade, called millinery or hat-making, covers the design, manufacture and sale of hats and headwear, so a milliner may design, make and sell hats.
Millinery is hat-making: the design, manufacture and sale of hats and headwear. The same word describes both the trade itself and the goods produced and sold by that trade.
A person engaged in the hat-making trade is called a milliner or hatter, so both names describe a hat maker. The two terms are used for people in the same trade.