SOMETHING ABOUT HATS.

Evening Post, Volume LX, Issue 120, 17 November 1900, Page 1 (Supplement)

SOMETHING ABOUT HATS.

In England the hat trade flourishes chiefly in the outskirts of Manchester. Demon has made hats for ages. Oldham once made hats, but cotton crowded them out and they moved on to Stockport, where they are crowding out the cotton. Hyde makes hats; so does Bury. And Denton, Stockport, Hyde, and Bury all have technical schools teaching hatting, evidently iritending to keep the trade as long as tKey can. It is a trade with interesting features (says the Leisure Hour), at present somewhat urfder "a cloud ih its' home departments owing to fashion among the multitude running so much on caps. It is not the hat factories that are busy now, but the cap factories, some of which arc turning out 5000 dozens a Week. Cappers seem to go on working all the year round; hatters do little in the winter, their season being from spring to autumn, when they are working overtime on. the patterns that by a slight difference in the shape of the crown or the least bit of an extra curve in the brim haive happened to catch the public taste. As the cap is displacing the hat, so is the felt hat displacing the silk hat, and yet, here and there, an unexpected run will occur on silk hats. In Leeds, for instance, the one silk hat factory hali quite a rush a, few months ago, to the great joy of the cigar shops. And why? Because silk hats led to a craze for frock coats as being the appropriate wear with them, and, as with a silk' hat and frock coat a pipe was evidently out of keeping, the curious consequence was an epidemic of cigar-smoking, which is still spreading in factory towns among moil who sport "toppers" at funerals, and then hire them out at sixpence an hour.