Hat & Headwear Definitions — hats, caps, helmets and headwear terms from Apparel Search
A pillbox hat is a small hat, usually worn by women, with a flat crown, straight, upright sides, and no brim. The modern woman's pillbox hat was invented by milliners in the 1930s and gained popularity due to its elegant simplicity, generally in solid colours and unaccessorised, though it could include a veil. The style is named after the small cylindrical or hexagonal cases that pills used to be sold in.
A pillbox hat is a small hat, usually worn by women, with a flat crown, straight, upright sides, and no brim.
The modern woman's pillbox hat was invented by milliners in the 1930s, and gained popularity due to its elegant simplicity. Pillbox hats were made out of wool, velvet, organdy, mink, lynx or fox fur, and leopard skin, among many other materials. They were generally designed in solid colors and were unaccessorized, but could include a veil.
Jacqueline Kennedy, First Lady of the United States from 1961 to 1963, was well known for her "signature pillbox hats", designed for her by Halston. Jackie Kennedy was actually wearing a pink one to match her outfit on the day of her husband President John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, Texas (November 22, 1963).
The pillbox hat is defined by what it leaves out as much as by what it includes. It is a small hat, usually worn by women, with a flat crown, straight, upright sides, and no brim. Each of those details points the same way, toward compactness and neatness. A flat crown removes the domed or shaped top of many hats, straight sides rise vertically instead of sloping or curving, and the absence of a brim means nothing extends outward beyond the sides themselves. The result is a contained, upright form that sits as a small, finished shape on the head. Because there is no brim to frame the face or cast shade, the pillbox works as dress headwear, an element of an outfit, rather than as protection against weather, and its effect depends on proportion, placement, and the outfit it completes.
The name explains the form to anyone who has never seen the hat. The style is named after the small cylindrical or hexagonal cases that pills used to be sold in, and the comparison is exact in the ways that matter: small scale, straight sides, and a flat top. Naming a hat after a familiar small container gave the public an instant mental picture of its size and shape, which is often how fashion names succeed. The modern woman's pillbox hat was invented by milliners in the 1930s, and gained popularity due to its elegant simplicity. That phrase describes the design method as well as the look: elegance achieved by removing decoration and complication, leaving a clean shape that depends on good materials and precise making rather than on trimming.
Simplicity of shape did not mean poverty of material. Pillbox hats were made out of wool, velvet, organdy, mink, lynx or fox fur, and leopard skin, among many other materials. A plain form can carry a luxurious fabric precisely because the shape does not compete with it: velvet gives the small hat depth and softness, fur gives it richness, organdy gives it lightness, and a patterned material such as leopard skin becomes the entire statement of an otherwise unadorned hat. They were generally designed in solid colors and were unaccessorised, but could include a veil. The veil is the telling exception, a single addition that softens the severity of the straight-sided form without disturbing its simplicity, and its occasional use shows that unaccessorised was a general rule of the style rather than an absolute one.
One wearer fixed the pillbox in public memory. Jacqueline Kennedy, First Lady of the United States from 1961 to 1963, was well known for her signature pillbox hats, designed for her by Halston. A signature hat is one a public figure wears so consistently and so visibly that the style and the person become associated in the public mind, and that association carried the 1930s milliners' design to a new generation in the early 1960s. Jackie Kennedy was actually wearing a pink pillbox hat to match her outfit on the day of her husband President John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. That fact, recorded with the outfit it matched, is part of why the hat remains so widely recognised: the pillbox appears in one of the most reproduced days in modern public imagery, in pink, as part of a coordinated outfit. For identification, the points remain the original design facts: small size, flat crown, straight upright sides, no brim, solid colour as the general rule, and materials ranging from wool and velvet to furs and leopard skin.
A pillbox hat is a small hat with a flat crown, straight, upright sides, and no brim. Its neat, upright form is what separates it from soft or wide-brimmed women's hats.
The style is named after the small cylindrical or hexagonal cases that pills used to be sold in. The hat's small, straight-sided shape resembled those pill cases, so the case gave the hat its name.
Jacqueline Kennedy, First Lady of the United States from 1961 to 1963, was well known for her signature pillbox hats, designed for her by Halston. She was wearing a pink one to match her outfit on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas.