One other eighteenth-century reference to full articles of paper clothing was in 1733, in a Leipzeg publication of the Aelderishe Lexicon. This clothing originated in India and was adopted by the fashionable women of Paris.2 These two examples were instances of using paper for fashionable attire where economics did not factor into the making of these luxurious upper-class garments. A more common use of paper in fashion was to imitate a textile such as straw or felt for millinery. Headwear was paramount for any woman during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and critical for the fashion maven. Paper hats have been produced for at least 250 years. The first written evidence goes back as far as 1747 and continues to this very day, running the gamut of styles, production methods, and purposes. Many of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century examples I have inspected personally are formed by what has been termed: paperboard; pasteboard; bonnet paper; or bonnet board. This was a process of using sheets of rag paper and embossing them with a wide variety of "straw plait" patterns. Fashionable straw Leghorn hats were widely coveted, difficult to obtain, and expensive. Due to its fine quality Leghorn could be tightly woven for a smooth, supple finish, which was unparalleled in any other straw. The French Revolution impeded access to Leghorn which was grown exclusively in the northern region of Italy. With the aid of incentives given by the Royal Society of Arts, milliners began to experiment with economical alternatives as a substitute to the highly taxed and very fashionable Leghorn straw.3 One of the results of these efforts was the development of a technique using Pulp Fashion: Eighteenthand paper to imitate straw. Stamped paper or bonnet board was trimmed with the same millinery finishings as traditional bonnets to give an overall effect of a straw bonnet. One of the two earliest known examples is in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession no. 1997.369).4 \[Editor's note: Please see photo of this bonnet on page 8, figure 11, as part of Mindell Dubansky's article on paper items from the Met.\] The bonnet is made of layers of rag paper embossed with concentric rows of squares to mimic plaited straw. The center of the bonnet is embossed with a circle of triangles, all meeting at a central point, in order to imitate the spiral pattern that appears at the crown of real straw hats. To further the illusion, the bonnet is trimmed with silk fly fringe, and the its two sections are adjoined by genuine straw plait and linen tape. The bonnet is 10.25 inches in diameter and was probably worn by a child, although it is possible that it belonged to an adult. A 1767 mezzotint depicts a similar style hat, which helps us to date and understand how popular an extant item was in its day.5 The earliest written reference to a paper hat that I have found so far is a 1747 poem, "To a Young Lady, On her plotting a Paper Hat," by Samuel Bowden. Other early records of paper hats include the mention of a paper bonnet that was purchased in 1754 for only one shilling6 and an advertisement for paper hats (at a sixth of the price of a horsehair hat) that appeared in the Salisbury Journal as early as 1756.7 There are stunning examples of paper hats in a handful of collections. In Toronto, Canada, there is a striking paperboard "straw" bonnet dated 1812 in the collection of Jonathan Walford. The bonnet is stamped in an unusual pattern that differs greatly from the other examples found. This bonnet has an overall straw pattern overlapped with stylized circle pattern. In my research I have located three hats, dated circa 1835, that truly appear to be related, in three separate institutions: the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, both in New York City, and the Peabody Essex Collection in Massachusetts. Designed in a coal scuttle bonnet style, each was fabricated with layers of light cream-colored rag paper that was sandwiched and embossed with distinct straw plait patterns. The two bonnets at F.I.T. and at the Met are practically identical: they have a herringbone pattern that from a distance appears to be straw. \[Editor's note: Please see photo of the Met's coal scuttle bonnet on page 8, Figure 12, as part of Mindell Dubansky's article on paper items from the Met.\] Three distinct die plates were used to create the faux straw. One die pattern was required for the central top of the crown, one for the barrel, and one for the brim. These were cut and hand stitched together using traditional materials such as linen tape, a fabric woven on the bias. Numerous pinholes indicate where ribbons and flowers would have been attached to the bonnets. Patent records are rich with information about the use of paper for millinery or apparel. I have found relevant patents that date back as early as 1791 and 1804. An 1829 patent describes the use of brass plates on pasteboard to create a finished product similar to the straw bonnets. There are many patent descriptions that detail a myriad of approaches to making a molded, waterproofed, dry- and wet-embossed, or stamped hat. By the late nineteenth century, there were processes for fabricating paper bonnets that imitate felt and velvet. However, predominantly paper was manipulated to look like straw. Due to well-executed imitation, paper hats have been chronically miscataloged as straw or felt. There are two bonnets in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession no. 50.30.1 and no. 60.23.11) which were officially documented as "straw" in their respective accession records from 1950 and 1960. At first they appear to be made from straw with an overcoat of paint. After careful inspection, curators recognized that they were made of paper and reassigned these collection items as paper. The telltale sign is the interruption of the straw plait pattern due to the chipped outer layer of papier mâché. In the nineteenth century, bonnets were also commonly made from felt by shaping a non-woven textile made of wool fibers onto a hat mold. As an economic alternative, milliners used paper to look like felt, and trimmed the paper bonnets in the same manner as genuine felt hats. They are nearly identical in appearance, although touching the surface betrays the difference. The ones made of paper are stiffer than traditional felt bonnets. There are two imitation-felt paper bonnets in the collection of The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession no. 60.23.24 and no. 57.21.1) that are have tested positive for the presence of animal fibers, along with vegetable cellulose. According to this 1867 paper hat patent, wool products were used when making some paper hats: "I prefer to take pulp made of vegetable fibrous substances, such as is used for the manufacture of paper, mixed with from fifteen to thirty percent of woolen fiber, such as the sheerings of woolen cloth, and in the operation a large quantity of water is used that is employed with pulp.8 With technological developments in the paper and pulp industry in the mid-nineteenth century, paper became cheaper to produce and the age of paper disposability evolved. For the apparel world, paper turned into more than an economic alternative to expensive textile materials. It became acceptable and fashionable to wear limited- use throwaway paper garments and clothing accessories. There was a proliferation of paper patents granted during the Reconstruction period of the United States (1865–77). In this "Age of Paper," patents for paper apparel included paper socks, skirts, raincoats, corsets, shirtfronts, collars and cuffs, shirtsleeves, and more. Coal—the main source of heat at the time—would leave a dark layer of soot on attire. To reduce the need to launder entire outfits, linen and cotton collars and cuffs were designed to be attached with buttons so that they could be easily removed for laundering. Heavily starched, these accessories felt and looked like paper already, so it was natural to mimic these items in the more affordable form of paper. During this disposable "Age of Paper," it was more accessible for the working classes to buy and discard paper collars, cuffs, and shirtfronts rather than laundering and reusing cotton or linen ones. According to Dard Hunter, "by 1870, paper collars were universally worn; a Boston manufacturer made 75,000,000 a year."9 In the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a "ten pack" of Lintex paper collars. The packaging notes that the collars are "made from a specially processed paper, LINEN FINISH." From a distance they make a reasonable imitation of linen. By the turn of the century, it became more fashionable for men to wear softer collars, spelling the unfortunate demise for the paper collar industry. Paper textiles continued to be explored in the twentieth century. In the 1930s there was a huge fad for creating fancy dress costumes with crepe paper, a springy machine-made paper. During the 1960s the pop fad of "paper" clothing was in fact a non-woven material called Reemay. Although "disposable" and textured like paper, Reemay is not paper. In the past few decades, couturiers have dabbled with paper, more as a novelty than as an economic or structural choice. Karl Lagerfeld, for Fendi, combined expensive fur lining with prosaic kraft paper to make a statement about luxury. In today's fashion, paper will occasionally pop up. As recently as Spring 2009, Chanel showcased paper hats on the runway. As we become alarmingly aware of our dwindling natural resources, paper has become precious once again. I believe that disposable fashion will no longer be popular. Rather, recycled and renewable resources will be the "fad" of the future. Profile and detail of a B.K. Ames papier mâché stamped "straw" bonnet, ca. 1869–1872, showing the chipped outer layer of papier mâché material. This hat was originally miscataloged as straw. \[60.23.11\] Collection The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Lintex paper collars, 1870s, shown flat and buttoned along with the ten-pack packaging. Collection The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 24 - hand papermaking _________ notes 1. Sigismund Andreas Flachs, Vestitium e papyro in Gallia nuper introductum (Lipsiae \[Leipzig\]: Litteris Schedianis, 1718), III. 2. D. Neumann, "How Paper Entered the Fashion Field," Papiermacher 46 ( July 1996): 104. 3. Madeleine Ginsburg, The Hat: Trends and Traditions (New York: Barron's Educational Series, 1990), 80. 4. The other eighteenth-century example is located in the Rougemont House Costume Museum in Exeter, England. It consists of a layer of paper between silk and stamped with a pattern to imitate lace. See P.M. Inder, "Eighteenth Century Hats in Exeter Museums," Costume VII (1972): 66. On a side note, I should mention that there is a third known eighteenth-century paper bonnet whose location is unfortunately unknown. The bonnet that is in the Met collection was originally bought by a dealer who purchased two bonnets at auction in England. One went to the Met and the other one went missing. 5. See image in Linda Baumgarten, Eighteenth-Century Clothing at Williamsburg (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1986), 39. 6. Melina Godman, "A Georgian Lady's Personal Accounts," The Journal of the Costume Society 25 (1991): 23. 7. Ginsburg, 57. 8. Henry Kellogg, 1867. Improvement in Machines for Making Paper Hats. US Patent 65,393. 9. Dard Hunter, Papermaking, The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft (New York: Knopf, 1967), 387.