CraigEster
New in Town
- Messages
- 24
- Location
- Tampa, FL
The history of hat plush gets muddy after the 1940s. After the closure of the last large French maker, the quality and consistency of plush declined and it was harder to get in general.
The brown color of some of these silks is probably from postwar experimentation with modern dyes. The traditional plush dyeing process was very long and arduous and shortcuts weren't possible without a decline in quality.
Black, as many will point out, isn't a color - it's the lack of color. Black is attained by making a strong mix of dyes that filter out most wavelengths of light. The black on silk top hats was refined in the 19th century and reached the peak with "huit-reflets" plush. This plush is a deep black with a blue color when viewed offhand and green undertones; the gloss is a warm white and the surface is almost as smooth as glass when polished correctly.
The expertise needed to get these results started to go away. In the 1950s it was noted that recently made plush was "slatey" and didn't have the blue or green in it, compared to the much more beautiful Edwardian-era plush. The decline started around 1920.
With what I know about natural dye, I think this brown is the result of someone new trying to make hat plush and using a brown component of the dye mix that is too strong. Once a batch comes out wrong, there's no way to undo it and you're left with a unique color. In this later era it would be novel to sell a unique color of hat, whereas a few decades prior you'd probably have your name ruined. The issue would be sorted out after one dye batch, making these hats probably quite rare.
More wild colors of plush were made, but these never reached the "huit-reflets" quality and were meant for novelty hats. The black plush is the glossiest. You can determine if this hat is a novelty hat or a failed black hat by seeing how glossy it is compared to a black one. If this hat has a similar gloss and the color is just off, it's probably a failed dye batch. If the gloss is noticeably less, then it is a novelty color. It's not 100% certain but the general rule is that the care and extra processes were put into black silk but not the other colors, which plush makers bought from various dyers in Lyon while they made their own black silk.
