Harlow and Bygone Fashion Trends: The Evening Hood
One of my favorite topics on the subject of fashion history are the quaint little trendy accessories that dot every era; some stuck it out and eventually matured into timeless classics, like the sixties miniskirt; some are entirely off-kilter today, such as the ‘jingle garter’ of the twenties.
Old Hollywood publicity portraits are a great way to gauge sartorial temperatures of the past, as fashion and film shared a gloriously symbiotic relationship in the studio era (and continue to do so in the present day). Those who have been around for awhile know I love the particulars of fashion photoshoots; the detailed snipes, the wealth of textures and materials, the different poses.
I’m revisiting a Harlow session I’ve covered before, taken October 21, 1936, by Ted Allan for Screenland magazine in between Libeled Lady (1936) and Personal Property (1937). Harlow wore three chic, dark ensembles I talk about in the previous post, which you can read here.
She also modeled the defunct ‘evening hood’ this day, which appears in the Screenland spread opposite a black fringe dress she wore during Madame Sans-Gêne on December 14, 1936:
While today this item looks a little too much like hijab to ever really come into vogue again (we have hoodies now, anyway), in late 1936 the ‘evening hood’ was being heralded as the latest in women’s winter fashion. “Velvet evening hoods lined in satin and detachable are big news,” wrote Marjorie Ellis McCrady of the Minneapolis Journal on December 7.
There’s two more twin shots of Harlow in the evening hood taken by Allan, one of which is in my collection:
Harlow often kept copies of hats and dresses she fancied from film and photoshoot alike, and her predictability surrounding comfortable, unpretentious accessories means I’m not surprised she never took the ‘evening hood’ for a spin outside the studio. I love how she’s taken hold of the sheer curtain behind her and incorporated it into the shot above, which draws the focus toward her face. Wonder how intentional that was–the small stylistic choices are another aspect I love about studio photography.
The ‘evening hood’ itself enjoyed its brief moment of popularity throughout the coming winters, until it reached a zenith in 1938; starlet Phyllis Brooks was reported to have ordered a personalized one ‘lined with ermine’ in November. One item printed in the Burlington Daily News in December proclaimed the accessory made an ideal Christmas gift due to their practicality in helping “protect the hair from the wind and prevent you from catching cold after warming up on a dance floor’.
By the forties the ‘evening hood’ had transformed into the more pragmatic ‘night hood’, which seemed to move away from the detached aspect by placing the hoods back on evening wraps:
Of the numerous trends Harlow helped or otherwise had a hand in ushering in, the ‘evening hood’ in its lacy, detached form has to be one of the most quizzical. It’s not an accessory you can necessarily keep on at dinner (or dancing, for that matter); did the girls put it up with their hats and evening jackets? Were there any fashion faux pas surrounding it–did anyone ever place a hat atop an ‘evening hood’ to create a lovely Cousin It look? I guess it was useful for preserving a hairdo out-of-doors, but I digress. Questions abound, and half of them are answered by the fact that nobody wears them in 2024.
At least there were cuter coiffure-covering fads that Harlow dipped her toes into; while the ‘evening hood’ falls short, the ‘bob bandeau’ from Bombshell (1933) could use another minute in the spotlight, though it’s essentially a bejeweled, backwards headband. Would still love to see this come back, though: