The Museum at FIT has a full house these days with its continuing exhibitions featuring
Ralph Rucci and Color in Fashion. They have added a third attraction, the first retrospective featuring a legendary celebrity hat designer.
Lilly Daché: Glamour at the Drop of a Hat looks back to a time when a hat was as essential an accessory as shoes, and Daché made the most of it
. Her career ended naturally just at the moment when women abandoned hats as an everyday necessity. She was something of a pioneer, running her own business in the 1920's, and becoming a household word, in a time when there was such a thing as a
famous hat designer. What is most fun about this small show organized and curated by FIT graduate students in the Fashion and Textile Studies: History, Theory, Museum Practice Program, is all the hats. Daché was as inventive creatively as she was in business. Here is a rare chance to see an exceptional collection of the increasingly abstract structures that fashionable women perched on their heads from the 1920s through the 1960s, demonstrating an opportunity for creativity and expression mostly lost to the past.
Lilly Daché: Glamour at the Drop of a HatThe Museum at FIT Seventh Avenue at 27th Street, Chelsea
