Hats In The In Crowd

My wife, Sharon, loves hats. She has several dozen. She divides them between summer hats and winter hats. Between Sharon’s love of hats and reading the fine blog. Clothes in Books, by my friend, Moira Redmond, I note when hats appear in crime fiction.

In The In Crowd Calliope Foster Millinery is doing well enough to give its sole employee, Callie, a tolerable living if she works 7 days a week.

Callie designs and makes hats, especially big hats, for the upper class women of the country. Her friend Harriet assists her by wearing Callie’s creations at Ascot.

When Callie meets DI Caius Beauchamp at the theatre
she is wearing a wide straw hat with silk monkshood flowers sewn into its burgundy band. (It is a coincidence that only three posts ago in Nightshade by Michael Connelly, the purple of nightshade flowers was featured. Monkshood is very much the same purple. While different species, nightshade and monkshood are often identified as the same flower.) Above and to the right are they type of hat I consider she was wearing and some monkshood flowers that would look wonderful on the band.

Callie lives in a world that still appreciates handwritten notes “landing on their doormat with a gentle thud and not in a text message with a ping”. She has personalised note cards printed for her and writes the notes with her “favourite fountain pen”.

She is uncertain she wants to expand her one woman business but answers the phone in the higher-pitched voice of the imaginary Amelia as “she pretended she had an assistant”.

Callie meets with clients individually. Penny is looking for a hat for her daughter’s summer wedding. She wants “something elegant, but distinct”. Callie suggests a pillbox.

In adding flowers to hats she considers the romantic meanings of flowers as defined in The Language of Flowers by Kate Greenaway. Who knew “deep red roses mean ‘shame’ “ and Monkshood means “Knight Errant”?

Callie has an endearing quirk about her hats:

‘I give all my hats names like Sophie in Howl’s Moving Castle. This is Petunia and this is Margot.’

It was not until this book that I learned the importance of hat blocks. For the equally uninformed they are carved wooden blocks to enable the milliner to shape a hat.

Callie loves vintage hat blocks and orders online German antique hat blocks. An example of vintage German hat blocks is above.

While Callie makes big hats for the big events she also makes small hats. The German antique hat blocks help her make cloches.

Sharon keeps hoping more women will wear hats but I cannot say I have observed a trend in women wearing hats. Pity.

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Vasell, Charlotte - (2025) - The In Crowd