About Buckram

Just a little entry today from my notebooks (I will soon be making buckram hats for my production of The Music Man, opening in November):

Buckram, a two-ply, coarse open weave fabric heavily filled with starch sizing, is now commonly used both as a binding for books and as the stiffening base for hats, belts, drapes and other items that are not comonly washed in water (the glue sizing is usually water soluble and can be pulled over a hat block, then left to dry into a hard shape, but too much exposure to water can result in a limp cheese-cloth-like fabric). It originally was used as the foundation fabric for rugs made in Bokhara, Turkey, from whence its name derives.

In the Middle Ages, bokeram was also a fine cotton or linen cloth, and not stiff. Italian merchants imported buckram from Turkey back to Italy, where it was called bucherame, as early as the 12th or 13th centuries. Marco Polo noted in his journals that a fine buckram was made by the Armenians who lived in the Turkish town of Erzincan.

According to Wikipedia, white buckram is most commonly used in hatmaking, though black is common as well. In fact, nowadays buckram can be found in a wide array of colors as it can be used as a hat shape by itself or stiff decoeration without covering. Millinery buckram comes in three weights: baby buckram (often used for children's and dolls' hats), single-ply buckram, and double buckram (also known as "theatrical crown"). I usually buy the double buckram because it is much stiffer, and otherwise I have to sew two or even three layers together to achieve the effect I want. The open thick look of plain buckram can be seen on the left in the image above, and on the right is a pre-made hat form one can buy ready to cover. It's a whole lot easier if they already have the style you want!!

About Crinolines

In the late 1850s and into the 1860s the fashion for very wide skirts led to the invention of the crinoline, which was a hooped cage contraption that allowed skirts to be made very full without the extra weight of many petticoats. At their extreme extent the hems of skirts measured as much as ten yards, according to a contemporary. Most men found this female fashion ridiculous, and many joked about its absurdity, at least until they got used to it.

    The crinoline caused quite a few unexpected problems. Where only a few years before a hostess could seat two or three women on a parlor sofa, now there would be barely enough room for the skirts of one. And many a careless woman would find her skirt sweeping Victorian bric-a-brac residing on a table onto the floor. Many a fellow passenger on an omnibus, too, scowled when a full-skirted women tried to board and shove herself into a single available seat, drowning her fellow passengers in folds of material from her dress.

    There were more dangerous problems, too. The dresses could catch strong winds, and literally lift and blow their wearers off their feet, which was extremely dangerous when strolling near cliffs or high walls. Sometimes the hooped petticoats of pedestrians would get entangled in the wheels of passing coaches or carriages, causing messy or injurious accidents. Women who fell into water were often dragged down by the weight of the yardage in their skirts, drowning before they could be rescued.

    Fire, too, was a big hazard, especially in an age of oil lamps, candles, and wood stoves. Many skirts were made of highly flammable materials and would swiftly catch fire should a skirt get caught too near an open flame while the wearer tried to lean in to cook or stoke a fire in the fireplace. A terrible disaster occurred on December 8, 1863, when 2000 women were burnt to death in a cathedral in Santiago, Chile, because the vast quantities of materials in their skirts added to feed the flames.

    "Take what precautions we may against fire, so long as the hoop is worn, life is never safe. All are living under a sentence of death which may occur unexpectedly in the most appalling form," wrote a commentator in London's The Illustrated News of the World in 1863.

The History of Chef's Hats

The chef's hat or toque is a distinctive article of clothing which immediately identifies the wearer, whether amateur or professional, as a preparer of foods. Like many articles of clothing, it has a long history, riddled with fables.

One story has it that the hat originated in ancient Assyria, when the king's chefs were so renowned that they were entitled to wear a crown of notoriety of their own, albeit in cloth, not precious metal. Another, more popular story says that in the 6th century, famous and learned chefs, fleeing Greece from the invading Turks, would hide out in Orthodox monasteries, where the monks wore tall black hats. The chefs copied that style, but in white, when they regained their freedom.

The reality is much more mundane. In medieval and Renaissance times, chefs wore hats in the smoky, dirty kitchens for two reasons: to keep their hair (and lice?) from falling into their eyes or the food that they were preparing, and to prevent the grease, gunk and soot on the ceiling from falling down in their heads. The shapes of hats varied in size and color at that time- some chefs wore berets, others skullcaps or stocking caps, while still others wore a version of the mortarboard style that we associate with graduation today.

At some point, some chef realized that making the crown of these brimless (that is what toque means, a brimless hat) caps taller helped to move trapped heat (kitchens were notoriously hot, at all times of the year) away from the head and up into the hat, so hats gradually got taller. As kitchens grew larger in the 18th century, it became more important to know at a glance who gave the orders that really counted. That's what the tall toque did- by giving the Head Chef the tallest hat, he could be found easily. A Viennese chef named Antonin Careme set the ultimate standard by propping his cap up with a piece of cardboard, and chefs have followed suit for centuries, though the cardboard has since been replaced by starch.

And, of course, as hygiene improved and people became more concerned with germs, white became the standard color (as in hospitals) for cleanliness, professionalism, and efficiency.

Another probably apocryphal story concerns the pleating in the tall hats. In "A Pageant of Hats, Ancient and Modern," by Ruch Edwards Kilgour (copyright, 1958) wrote: "It was regarded as natural that any chef, worthy of the name, could cook an egg at least one hundred ways. The most-renowned chefs often boasted that they could serve their royal masters a different egg dish every day in the year, some of them so cleverly prepared, that aside from being highly palatable they had flavors as widely different as completely diverse kinds of foods. Today, noted chefs are seldom called upon to prove their prowess in this manner. Nevertheless, they still wear one hundred pleats on their hat, the old-time symbol of their skill in the egg department." Most toques these days sport many fewer than 100 pleats, and the pleats, in reality, are mainly there to help support the fabric in staying up.

Today, chefs are less concerned about their headgear. Kitchens are often air-conditioned, and hats are sometimes not worn at all. Some chefs wear baseball caps. Some chef's hats are now made out of paper and are disposed of at the end of the day. In some grand kitchens or restaurants, the style and shape of the hat denotes what kind of chef you are, whether you make the sauce or soup or specialize in desserts, but there are no set rules.

The next time you see a chef, notice what kind of hat he's wearing. Is it a tall, cylindrical one made out of paper, or a cloth one that resembles a loaf of un-baked bread? Then remember that such a simple article of clothing has such a long and fabulous history!

SOURCES: The LA Times, March 21, 2001, and from various spots on the web, including the Ed Kane at the Las Vegas Register (http://lvrj.com/lvrj_home/1998/Mar-18-Wed-1998/lifestyles/7128827.html), and the folks at The Straight Dope (http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_025.html)