DACHE, LILLY 1913-1990

MILLINER

The Well-Designed Hat

"A hat that is well designed never goes out of fashion," claimed Lilly Dache. "I wear some of mine three and four years." Dache was the best-known milliner of the 1930s. By 1940 she had produced around nine thousand hats, which sold for twenty-five dollars at forty-seven department stores across the country. In the 1930s she was best-known for her half-hat, a hat with a narrow brim and crown that sat on the back of the head. The millinery industry embraced the half-hat as its best weapon against what it called the insanity of "the hatless craze." Dache was also attributed with starting the popularity of the turban in the 1930s.

Bicycle Cap as Inspiration

From age ten Dache displayed a flair for original hats. When her mother ordered her a traveling suit composed of a black-and-white checkered skirt and bright red jacket, Dache promptly stopped at a bicycle store and bought herself a red cap to go with her new outfit. She never completed her purchase, as the store owner sought confirmation from her mother. Yet the experience left its mark on the young Dache: no collection she designed was ever without the visored cap for travel.

Early Life

Born in Beiles, France, Dache started sewing doll clothes at a young age from expensive fabric scraps from her mother's wardrobe. She hated school and was truant so often that when she was fourteen her parents refused to spend any more money on books that she did not read. As a teenager she apprenticed with an aunt who was a milliner in Bordeaux. In the 1920s Dache immigrated to the United States with fifteen dollars in her pocket and was promptly hired as a salesgirl in a New York millinery.

Starting Her Own Shop

Within a few years Dache had saved enough money to open her own shop and began producing forty to fifty hats a day. She soon had a devoted following and in the early 1930s moved into a complete building. During the decade she made hats for such stars as Marlene Dietrich, Carmen Miranda, Carole Lombard, Joan Crawford, and Sonja Henie. Her hat sales triggered lines outside her building that at times led to disagreements with the police.

Sculptural Hats

Dache's hats had unusual designs and utilized a range of fabrics previously unseen in the millinery industry. Usually they were asymmetrical; crowns and brims were often tilted to one side, and some hats were trimmed with veils designed to hang down on one side of the head, turn under the chin, and be pinned with a brooch to the hat on the other side. During World War II, when materials were in short supply, she made hats from mop yarn and gold epaulets from uniforms. In the summer she made hats from dress buttons, topstitching the brims to give them the proper shape. In the 1940s she expanded her business into perfumes called Drifting and Dashing and added dresses and accessories to her millinery designs.