Atlanta semi-weekly journal. (Atlanta, Ga.) 1898-1920, 1909-11-12
The Millinery
Business
BY Frederic j. Haskin

The National Millinery Jobbers' associa-
ton now holding it's annual convention IN
New York is an organization concerned
more with the financial side of millinery
business than with the artistic. The mil
linery business in the United states Is a
barometer which registers the slightest
variation in the prosperity of the country.
Americans are at once the most prosper
Gus and the most extravagant people in
the world and both qualities are shown IN
the fact that the American millinery bill
Is larger than that of all the rest OF the
world combined. Paris makes the styles,
Paris makes the prices, and Paris makes
the hats, but it is not alone for the
Parisienne OF course there are many
smartly dressed women in Paris probably
more than in any other city, but even in
that vortex of the whirlpool of fashion 1t
is only the few who have either the de-
sire or the money to follow the vagaries
of the milliners.
In the United States, on the other hand,
there is not village, however remote,
to which the fashion journals do not pen
citrate and in which the feminine heart IS
not enslaved to it's own conception OF
what is the smartest and the latest thing
in hats. In fact if Paris is the alpha OF
millinery then is Podunk the omega, for
verify it is in the backwoods villages that
styles in hats reach the extreme of fad
dishness.
The village belle and the farmers
daughter of La Belle France go through
their thrifty youth with never a though:
of apeing the hats of the grand ladies
Of Paris. The American village belle and
farmers daughter are subscribers to the
smartest fashion magazines and their hats
must be built in exact imitation of the
newest pictures in the gayest of FASH
Ion plates. And all of this means more
money for the milliners. Prices of wo-
mems hats run long scale upward from
the country store where a IS hat is con-
sidered creation" up to the smart city
shop where 1t Is absolutely impossible
to find anything that looks like hat for
less than S25, and where even the $25-dol-
lar customer must quail before the lifted
eyebrows and upturned nose of the sales
lady.
Every spring and fall the women of the
United States who buy cheap hats exhibit
more courage than ever has been exhibit
ed by any army on any battlefield in the
history of warfare. If 1t is humiliatlng
not to buy the highest priced hat in the
shop, II is disgraceful to buy the cheap
est one. 1t is not 10 be supposed for an
instant that milliners are unaware Of
this condition of affairs. They know that
many women are brave enough to bag
gle over the price and to actually buy a
cheap hat, but they also know that there
are thousands who are frightened into
paying the greater price. They also know,
learned as they are in the ways of wo-
men-nature that there are thousands and
thousands OF women who are perfectly
willing to buy SO hat If only it so be
that they are required to pay 500 for that
same hat. Milliners, in their confidential
moments, will confess that they are able
to recognize such women at sight and
that when one comes into the shop all
prices are doubled automatically.
Large shops and department stores put
the prices on the hats in plain figures,
thereby preventing the sliding scale from,
operating. However. there is many a wo-
man who goes into the large shop and
buys hat on the virtue of the plainly
marked price tag who is very much de-