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Millinery Maneuvers
Annette John -Hall Inquirer Staff Writer
Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA)
June 24, 2004
Section: FEATURES MAGAZINE
Edition: CITY-D
Page: D01
Millinery maneuvers
For African American churchwomen, a hat is their crowning glory.
They love to let self-expression go to their heads.
Annette John-Hall INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
Her chamomile-petal crown adorning her head like a rhinestone-studded halo, Henrietta Swan-Price looks like a hatted angel.
Or, at the very least, like an evangelist, because Swan-Price is spreading the gospel of hat-wearing.
"If you want to look nice and feel good about yourself, you should wear a hat - you don't have to buy a new outfit," she declares. Swan-Price is a Seattle milliner who is in town for the musical Crowns, which runs through July 3 at the Prince Music Theater.
Swan-Price, owner of Henrietta's Brimming With Elegance Hats, provided most of the 120 headpieces that serve as the play's props and scenery. Resplendent from head to toe in lollipop pink - pink suit, pink shoes, pink pocketbook and pink crown - she is head-turning proof of the power of a woman in a hat.
The habit of African American women wearing hats as a form of self-expression is almost as old as the black church itself.
Hats have been around for centuries. In the hat's modern heyday, the hat shop was as important to fashionable women as the shoe store is today. Few women would be caught dead in public without their requisite hat and gloves.
By the 1960s, wigs, hairdressers and informality usurped the hat's appeal. Hair was teased and back-combed into designs that rivaled the most elaborate headgear. Who needed a wide brim when you could sport a huge Afro?
But churchgoing black women of a certain age never stopped wearing hats. And with the emergence of innovative milliners such as Tim Crawford, owner of T Crawford's Fine Millinery on Fourth Street, hats are poised for a comeback - or so hat-people predict.
"Millinery will never die if you have a spirited designer," says Crawford, who creates showy headpieces to be worn on fashion runways as well as in church pews. Speaking of black churchwomen, his most loyal clientele, he adds: "We will always go to church, and we will always praise God. My ladies will spend their last dime to look good."
Crowns, the gospel-infused musical written by actress and playwright Regina Taylor and adapted from the picture book Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats, by Michael Cunningham and Craig Marberry, brings this phenomenon to life through dance, song and words. Taylor crafted Crowns' dialogue by taking snippets of interviews from the book. The women's oral histories explain how hat-wearing merges faith and fashion:
I think adorning the head is a retention of African tradition. . . . Hats are a part of us.
Put on a church hat and I had instant class, a bunch of class.
But Crowns' true stars are the hats themselves: the wide and stingy "brims," the derbys and the tiers, the straws and the felts, the cloches and the shingle cuts, the ones so embellished with sequins and feathers they look as if they're ready to fly away.
In Philadelphia, the birthplace of the first independent black church, hat-making and clothes-making were popular occupations among African Americans as early as the 1850s. Today, Philadelphia is home to hundreds of black houses of worship. And where there's a church, there's a churchwoman wearing a hat.
*
Ilene Pounds stopped at the Hat Shoppe, a fixture on 29th and Girard since 1941, to pick up her showpiece, a $200 silver metallic helmet that she planned to wear to a church convention in Charlotte, N.C.
"My mother always wore a hat. I used to love to watch her put it on," the 66-year-old retiree recalls. "I was told you're not really dressed unless you wear a hat and gloves. The hats don't have to be skyscrapers, but they have to have a personality. I like sassy, not fussy."
Every hat is not for every woman. . . . You shouldn't wear a hat wider than your shoulders. . . . Your hat shouldn't be darker than your shoes. . . . Sequins and glitter aren't appropriate for daytime or in church."
Before the advent of Afros, Ralinda Galback used to wear hats to church. But her hairstyle became her headpiece and now Galback, 50, a member of First Colored Wesley Methodist Church in South Philadelphia, forgoes church hats altogether.
"I dress for church, but it's not the formal, pulled-together look," the West Philadelphia day-care operator says. "It's more of a work-casual look."
Also, Galback says she is "too short to wear a hat. A lot of hats are overpowering."
Plenty of women believe that - until they try one.
"I was totally shocked over women's reaction to hats," marvels Jimmy Ghee, a former policeman who became owner of the Hat Shoppe in 1996. "They'll come in here and look at these hats. It's like they've stepped into heaven."
Ghee says he learned the hat business from local milliner Alzie Jackson, a master craftsman who taught a hat-making course at Moore College of Art and Design before his death last year. Ghee sells hats costing $85 to $600, by designers from the United States and the United Kingdom. His clients are mostly churchwomen of a certain standing: deaconesses, church mothers and first ladies - pastors' wives.
One of them, Carmella Shaw, was in, readying herself for the National Baptist Congress convention in Memphis. The petite, ebullient first lady of White Rock Baptist Church in West Philadelphia is married to the Rev. William Shaw, president of the National Baptist Convention, USA, and arguably the most powerful African American church leader in the nation.
Shaw chose five hats for her trip - including three Tim Crawfords - that cost more than $1,000. Ghee helped her stack the headpieces in a huge hat drum, which Shaw will ship to Memphis beforehand.
It's a lot of work, but that's how much she cares about her hats. A seamstress who has a degree in home economics, she used to make her own.
"Once I took a cape with a paper flower and made a hat out of it and wore it to church," Shaw recalls with laugh. "Who cares about a cape when you need a hat?"
By her estimation, the North Carolina native owns about 200 hats, which she stores in her garage, separated by color and season. She glues Polaroids of her babies to hatboxes she buys from T.J. Maxx, the better to match them with her shoes (let's not even start about the shoes).
Yet Shaw doesn't consider herself cursed with anything like a chapeau version of "the Imelda syndrome."
"The more you're involved in church, the more you wear hats," Shaw says. "Let's see, there's the luncheon I'll need a hat for, my husband's keynote address, the final-night service. . . . "
She tried on the showpiece of her new quintet, a silver gladiator helmet with plumes, feathers and netting.
She placed her crown on her head and then, in automatic reflex, put her hand on her hip. This is defined as "hatitude."
"Girl, you are wearing that hat." That's the talk we talk.
Contact staff writer Annette John-Hall at 215-854-4986 or ajohnhall@phillynews.com.
"Crowns" plays at the Prince Music Theater through July 3. Information: 215-569-9700 or www.princemusictheater.org.
Illustration:PHOTO
Shaw decided to pick up this handmade number and two others by Philadelphia designer Tim Crawford.
Carmella Shaw has a good time trying on a hat. She owns about 200, she says, storing them in her garage by color and season.
RON TARVER / Inquirer Staff Photographer
Jimmy Ghee, owner of the Hat Shoppe on Girard Avenue, prepares to fill Carmella Shaw's box with her five new hats. She planned to ship them to Memphis to wear at a Baptist convention.
RON TARVER / Inquirer Staff Photographer
The Hat Shoppe on Girard Avenue displays its wares by color, above. Manager Lorraine Ghee-Slater helps Carmella Shaw, right, who eventually bought five.
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Copyright (c) 2004 The Philadelphia Inquirer
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