Milliners Guild display opens at The Gallery at The Met

On September 28th, The Gallery at the Met Museum Store hosted the Milliners Guild, guest designer and author B. Michael and fellow hat lovers to an opening reception. The millinery collection celebrates Mildred Blount, her unique talent and the winners of the Mildred Blount millinery competition.

The Metropolitan Museum owns a hat credited to John Frederics who was Mildred’s employer at the time she created many of the hats for Gone With the Wind (two rows down, R). To honor her, they posted a photo of hat with the following description ~
In a memorable scene from the Hollywood interpretation of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1939), character Scarlett O’Hara (played by actress Vivien Leigh) fashions a hat and gown from curtains in preparation to charm a suitor and seek financial assistance. Scarlett’s making do with what was available during wartime resonated with American society in the 1940s, when, to compensate for wartime shortages, offbeat materials were routinely appropriated for fashionable accessories. Commercial replicas such as this one were subsequently reproduced by a wholesaler who licensed the rights to sell Gone with the Wind hat styles under the John Frederics, Inc. label. Though the costume designer received the sole credit for the original creation, and neither the millinery salon of their team were acknowledged for the contributions to the film, in the recent years historians have unearthed the key role that the milliner Mildred Eliza Blount (American 1902-1974) played in designing and producing many hats that were featured in the movie. Not only was Blount a critical member of John-Frederics studio, but she was an independently talented milliner with an important and lengthy career spanning New York and Los Angeles.
Photos courtesy of Robin Blackstone. Cassie MacGregor and Lisa McFadden.