Franz Lehár’s operetta, Die lustige Witwe, first performed on December 30, 1905 in Vienna and better known over here as The Merry Widow, proved a cultural hit both for its popular tunes but also for its mark on fashion history. In the 1907 English adaptation the statuesque Lily Elsie played the main character, Hanna Glawari. Her costume, designed by Lucile, featured a black, wide-brimmed hat covered with filmy chiffon and festooned with piles of feathers. It was a sensation and became the must have look for fashionable Edwardian ladies.
It was a direct descendent of the “Gainsborough” hat which Georgiana Cavendish, the Duchess of Devonshire, had worn while posing for her famous portrait painted by Thomas Gainsborough between 1785 and 1787, and complimented the change in women’s fashion which was moving from the languid S-curve of the early 1900s to the streamlined, athletic look popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
As women sought to outdo each other with their Merry Widow hats, as they became known, they became even more extravagant, made of straw, often more than 18 inches wide and topped with all kinds of trimmings, even the occasional stuffed bird. This new fashion was meat and drink to the Edwardian satirists and popular magazines such as Punch frequently poked fun at the difficulties a Merry Widow Hat posed to both wearer and bystander.
The dangers posed by a Merry Widow hat were not just the figments of the satirical mind. In October 1908, Joseph Lewis, a farmer from Bloomington in Illinois, was rushing to catch a train when he collided with a woman wearing an enormous brimmed hat. According to newspaper reports at the time, the corner of the hat “pierced Lewis’ eye, inflicting an injury which speedily cost him the vision”. Doctors feared that he might lose sight in his other eye “through sympathy”. As for the woman, she must have also been in a hurry as “she kept on her way ignorant of the unfortunate mishap which befell Lewis.”
In New York the Merry Widow craze was not just restricted to hats. Corsets, cigars, chocolates, liqueurs and the like were produced to cash in on the craze and the nascent American film industry was not about to miss the boat, rushing out snappy one-reelers based around merry widows in their ludicrously extravagant hats. The Merry Widow retained its popularity until the onset of the First World War, although its pre-eminence was imperilled by the fad for smaller (and more practical) toques and turbans popularised by Paul Poiret.
As for Lehár, even before the days of lucrative merchandising contracts, this operetta made him a multi-millionaire.
windowthroughtime 