LITTLE ROCK — Elaine Saunders stepped into Bachrach’s Millinery in northwest Washington one late winter day in 1953, and there it was, calling her name: a pale fuchsia straw hat with an upturned brim and matching rosebuds circling the crown.
“It’s a Mr. John,” Saunders, now 77, recalls without explanation, certain the designer’s name alone says this was no ordinary hat.
She paid $5 to put it on layaway and made regular installments until she’d covered the $35 cost. When she finally clutched the gold braided handle of the pink floral hat box and strutted out of the shop, she knew that this final touch to her pale pink suit would place her among the best-dressed young ladies at Zion Baptist Church. And that would be no small feat, since every proper church lady back then wore hats.
For generations, church sanctuaries across the nation on Sunday, especially in black churches, transformed into a collage of hats: straw ones, felt ones, velvet ones, every shape, size and color, with bows, jewels and feathers, reaching for the heavens.
But anyone walking into today’s services expecting to see a nonstop parade of women making fashion statements on their heads will be sorely disappointed. Many daughters and granddaughters of the women who made bold and flashy hats synonymous with the black church have not carried on the tradition.
Anita Saunders, 42, Elaine’s youngest daughter, who lives in Indianapolis, grew up watching her mother’s generation flaunt their hats in church.
“And I always loved it,” she says. “It was part of Sunday, the experience of the hats. We looked forward to seeing what hat sister so-and-so was going to wear. My friends, we all grew up in the same church with mothers who wore hats, but we don’t. And so, yes, it seems it’s fading out.”
The National Museum of African American History and Culture, under construction on the National Mall, will immortalize one source of this tradition when it re-creates the hat shop of Mae Reeves, a 99-year-old milliner who was one of the first black female business owners in downtown Philadelphia.
In the 1940s and ’50s, Mae’s Millinery made one-of-a-kind creations for the stars, including Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt and Marian Anderson, as well as some of the city’s most prominent socialites, who sometimes rolled up in limousines.
But it was the regular church ladies, black and white, who made up about half of the shop’s business and helped keep the place open for 50 years, buying “showstoppers” for Sunday morning, said Reeves’ daughter, Donna Limerick, a documentary producer for a Maryland-based company who went to work in her mother’s shop when she was 15.
Like Reeves, who lives in a suburban Philadelphia nursing home, many of the most celebrated black milliners are well past retirement age. In Washington, Vanilla Beane, maker of the famed creations worn by late civil-rights and women’s activist Dorothy Height, is 92. Though Beane is still making hats, few younger business owners have taken up the art.
By 1987, Reeves was 75 and most of her customers were fellow senior citizens.
“Even though business was declining, Mae kept the shop running by taking orders from her special clients, up until 1997, when she was 85 years old,” Limerick says.
By then, Limerick had found her way back to hats, and she now wears them all the time.
High Profile, Pages 44 on 04/15/2012