For millennia, European women have used head-coverings for protection, modesty, and in more recent centuries, for fashionable display. From early Christian times until well into the medieval era, married women wore concealing hoods and veils, similar to nuns’ headdresses. Secular fashion advanced from the 1400s, by when farm workers wore felt or fur winter caps, or wide-brimmed summer straw hats. Merchant-class women wore folded and pinned linen headdresses, the quality of the linen and complexity of construction signifying status. High-ranking ladies adopted various extraordinary modes combining netted cauls and artificial ‘horns’, followed by highly-exaggerated styles such as the towering veiled steeple and wide butterfly headdresses of the 1470s/1480s.

More than any other dress item, headwear reflects its geographical origins, thereby often indicating the wearer’s nationality or region. In Tudor England, hooded headdresses either featured the pointed frame – the English gable headdress – or curved frame, the French hood. From the mid-1500s ladies adopted masculine-style felt or velvet caps, for riding and travelling, while the 1600s vogue was for dashing plumed cavalier beaver hats. During the 17th and 18th centuries, versions of the neat white linen mob cap were usual for working women, worn outdoors with a hooded cloak. Women of all classes continued to wear male hats, for example functional black felt hats by countrywomen, and fashionable tricorne hats and later, ostrich-plumed beaver hats, by ladies hunting, riding, carriage driving and walking.

Headwear grew increasingly diverse, with various types worn for different occasions, including delicate hair ornaments for evening functions. Novelties might be inspired by topical events, like turbans, following the Battle of the Nile (1798). Bonnets framing the face and tied with ribbons under the chin were customary in the early-mid 1800s, but during the mid-late Victorian era more structured hats grew fashionable. Styles changed frequently and trimmings ranged from lace and bows to feathers, even whole stuffed birds, the vast international plumage trade causing tragic carnage and the near-extinction of many bird species between 1860 and 1920. Enormous ‘Titanic-era’ hats appeared in the early-1900s, becoming smaller, then wider again during the 1910s. Many styles followed, neat, fitted helmet-like cloche hats a universal fashion from the mid-1920s to early-1930s. Hats remained important throughout the 1930s and 1940s, with headscarves becoming a convenient wartime fashion. Post-war conventional ladylike suits required neat headwear, but from the mid-1950s onwards this traditional accessory grew outmoded, becoming reserved for special occasions.