The Easter parade was, primarily, a 19th-century US invention - an incentive dreamed up by New York hat-manufacturers at the end of the American Civil War. It was a public relations coup de grace, created to show off the latest designs in bonnets for women and hats for men. It moved from innovation to institution, for a time even rivalling the Big Apple's St Patrick's Day Parade as a family day out. Fifth Avenue was blocked off for the day and thousands of people of all ages, including children, dressed in their best and paraded their new headwear.
This massive promotion benefited the trade to such an extent that by the 1880s the Easter Parade had become an established tradition in most big US cities. Then, with the advent of the bob, the hat as accessory began to lose momentum. Even with this new bare-head thrill, however, in the 1920s even the least fashionable woman was expected to purchase up to four hats in a season. Alas, by the mid 1940s Mr John, the American milliner, inadvertently sealed the hat's fate with his Civil War-inspired Gone With The Wind confections. Vivien Leigh offered the designer no advice; what the actress said was: "John, all I ask is, let them see me before they see the hats."
The romantic, leghorn cartwheel with the deep green velvet ribbons summed up 18th-century plantation life. His second design, the Parisian bonnet of dark green taffeta which Rhett Butler brought Scarlett, to persuade her out of her hypocritical mourning, was also delightfully quaint. It may have made Vivien Leigh cry: "Oh, the darling thing", but modern it wasn't. Mr John advised Cecil Beaton on the hats for My Fair Lady, another romantic moment in hat history. The black and white Ascot scene that inspired Beaton was based on fact. In 1910, after the death of Edward VII (one half of the royal couple responsible for invigorating Ascot), he was remembered with a "Black Ascot", when every woman wore mourning and trimmed her hat with black. It was heralded as the most elegant Ascot ever.