That fine poet and Hattic truffle-hunter Trevor Joyce sent me an image of “An ad from 1910, I gather,” adding:
Since you dealt with the chip hat recently, this caught my attention
in a FB group (Dublin in photos/memories past & present), and I’m
stopped short by the cluster of other terms. Putty is presumably just
a light greyish brown, and trimmed just means something hattish, but
the rest?
Alas, I don’t know how to share the image, but the text reads:
MILLINERY
Soft Flexible Chip, Trimmed Velvet. In all
self colours and putty, and new burnt
trimmed, all shades, 5/11MANSFIELD
SISTERS
THE RECOGNISED MILLINERS,
28 Wicklow Street.
Anybody know what that “self colours and putty, and new burnt” stuff means? (Amusingly, if you google “soft flexible chip” you get hits like “Professor George Malliaras, who worked on the soft, flexible chip from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering…”)
If I google ‘all self colours’ I get guinea pigs! But ‘self-coloured’ just means the colour of the thing it’s made of. (For guinea pigs it means the same colour all over, which I suppose could also be the case for a hat.)
I assume ‘burnt’ is the OED’s 7a or 7b:
7.a. burnt (colour), a deep shade of yellowish brown; so burnt-coloured adj.
7.b. Of a colour or shade of colour: having the appearance of darkening by scorching.
Putty (5b), according to the OED, is a light shade of yellowish grey.
Trimmings are the decorations of the hat – ribbons or cloth flowers or feathers or whatever.
“Self” here means uniform, not patterned, going back to the 1500s. (OED self adj., II, esp. II.2).
There’s a lot of recent usage among animal breeders. Guinea pigs as Jen said, but also dogs, cats, and rats.
I thought the OED’s ‘self-coloured’ 1 – 1603– Of its natural colour; not dyed, painted, or otherwise artificially coloured. – was more likely in this case, because I don’t see why putty wouldn’t be one of the self colours otherwise. But you may be right, I’m not a hat expert!
You could put the image on a free hosting site such as Flickr or Imgur and link to it.
I wonder whether it means “trimmed in all self colors, putty, and new burnt”, that is, for any shade you get the hat in, you can get velvet trimmings that are the same color as the hat or putty or (new!) the “burnt” color that JiE mentioned.
Hm. Now I’m confused. If ‘solid’ is meant, why add “putty” and “burnt” separately, assuming those are solid as well? And if ‘natural, undyed’ is meant, why “all self colours”?
(I’m not a hat expert either.)
(For guinea pigs it means the same colour all over, which I suppose could also be the case for a hat.) In the world of daylily hybridizing ,where I spent this morning on my knees in blue river bottom clay, self means, as Y says, uniform. For the hemerocallis sense, look at the color description for Scott Elliott’s Too Pink to Think.
Too Pink to Think
“ Color description: very pink self with an intense green throat”
i would think that “all self colors” means the various colors of different materials, with the others mentioned as available options: “putty” i’m guessing meaning a treatment that yields yellow-grey, and “new burnt” either freshly-done scorch treatment, or something else yielding a darker brown. all of that in contrast to the “all shades” of velvet trim.
daylily
Oh, is that what those things are called? (Are there nightlilies?)
you can get velvet trimmings that are the same color as the hat
I *think* that you can get trimmings in any colour that the shop has velvet in. But who knows.
Things like this based on a lost shared knowledge do kind of fascinate me – once upon a time there was no need to specify, because everyone the advert was aimed at would know, and now because it wasn’t specified we haven’t a clue.
Oh, is that what those things are called? (Are there nightlilies?)
Are you cereus? (Sorry, wrong family.)
Daylilies, aptly named Hemerocallis, have flowers that last only a day. According to a well-known international computer network, they’re the source of the lily buds used in Chinese cooking.
I *think* that you can get trimmings in any colour that the shop has velvet in.
My hypothesis is that they’re telling you they stock velvet to match every color of soft flexible chip hat they sell. Also that the Mansfield sisters are better milliners than copywriters.
Things like this based on a lost shared knowledge do kind of fascinate me – once upon a time there was no need to specify, because everyone the advert was aimed at would know, and now because it wasn’t specified we haven’t a clue.
Me too!
Daylilies, aptly named Hemerocallis, have flowers that last only a day. According to a
well-known international computer networkcurmudgeonly hattic reader, they’re the source of the lily buds used in Chinese cooking. “Roadside Orange”, a.k.a., Ditch Daylilies,provide an abundance of edibles.
Eat me!
Eat me! Second try.
Sorry for the dead link.
Maybe it should read “self colours, and putty-and-new-burnt”?
Putty and New Burnt are certainly colours, eg The Bystander 3 May 1911 p. ix “The Carlsbad” “Supplied in Black, Cerise, Emerald, Royal, Navy, Saxe, Violet, Amethyst, Brown, Mole, Tan, Putty, and New Burnt.”
Looking up “new burnt” in that era, I find references to new-burnt brick and new-burnt tile. Perhaps, then, the color is that of new brick, not yet faded by exposure.
(Why would bricks fade? I venture a guess that brick-red hematite is hydrated in air to form yellowish limonite.)
@mollymooly: OK, I modify my hypothesis to include “new burnt” as a color. Also I just learned that “saxe” is “saxe blue”, originally “Saxony blue”, indigo in sulfuric acid. Merriam-Webster gets all specific: “a grayish blue that is redder and paler than electric, greener and slightly lighter than copenhagen, redder, lighter, and stronger than Gobelin, and greener, lighter, and stronger than old china”.
@Y: Looking for “new burnt” in conjunction with “color” in Google Books, I see a lot of “new burnt orange”, though there are others.
Bricks’ color would be dulled by soot. Athel Cornish-Bowden, who occasionally comments here, once told me that the cliché “grey stones of Oxford” became yellowish-brown when people started cleaning them.
Bloix comments “occasionally.” Athel Cornish-Bowden is a regular.
Phrases like “black or burnt,” “natural or burnt,” “burnt-colored,” “burnt shade,” and so on come up in a lot of millinery ads from around the same time in reference to straw hats. This leads me to believe that “putty” is a reference to the natural color of the chip straw and “burnt” is a darker shade achieved with a heat treatment (which seems to have been fashionable right around then, judging by other references—hence the “new”). “Self colors” would therefore also be a reference to the color of the hat itself, if you want a dyed version rather than natural or burnt. And although saying that the hat is available in a range of hues to match the range of velvet trim seems kind of contorted, I think that’s probably what they mean by “self”: “matching,” rather than “solid.” Unless “all self [solid] colors” has become such a stock phrase to them that they’re not thinking about whether that specific material is ever likely to be patterned.
(By the way, don’t google millinery ads from the 1910s unless you’re prepared to repeatedly come across a certain racial slur being used as a color name. Not even with “brown,” just by itself.)
For surprises in restoration, new copper roofs quickly turn a darkish brown; it takes 40 years or more for the green to come in. The church next to the parliament building here in Copenhagen burnt down in 1992 and was opened in 1997. The roof was still brown when I saw it a month ago. (Along with that of the Thorvaldsen Museum next door).
This is how they looked in 2005.
I’m guessing that “5/11” is the price per hat, being five shillings elevenpence, which is just a penny less than six shillings even. Was that sort of immaterial “visual discount,” akin to pricing something in the current U.S. at e.g.* $59.99 rather than $60.00, common practice for sterling-denominated retailers back then?
*5/11 in UK currency back then was equivalent to around $1.44 in U.S. currency, which was supposedly worth almost $50 in 2025 currency, although it may be implausible to assume that the price of millinery has tracked “average” inflation rather than increasing at a different slope.
And now I learn from @mollymooly’s link that “pedal” is “the lower and thicker part of a kind of straw grown in Italy for weaving and plaiting; a plait made from this straw, usually having five or seven strands,” which is “< Italian pedale base of the trunk or stem of a plant (see pedal n.1).”
“In this style 10/6”
@Brett, I don’t know if the 10/6 pricing goes back to the pre-Disney original, but fur/felt hats could easily have been more expensive than straw …
@J. W. Brewer: Here it is from 1869. No doubt I’ll be corrected if I’m wrong, but I think that hat is silk.
@Jerry F.: there are a wide variety of potential hat raw materials pricier than straw!
Beaver felt would have been the fanciest for a top hat at that time.
Even in the 1960s, I had to tell my mother (b. 1912) that she really mustn’t say ‘n…… brown’. She didn’t mean it offensively, it was just what her generation called that shade.
@Brett: Thanks, I didn’t know that.
For what it’s worth, this page says
@ JWB: “I’m guessing that “5/11” is the price per hat, being five shillings elevenpence, which is just a penny less than six shillings even. Was that sort of immaterial “visual discount,” akin to pricing something in the current U.S. at e.g.* $59.99 rather than $60.00, common practice for sterling-denominated retailers back then?”
Yes. Right up to D-Day (sometime in the early 70s), everything that would be more sensibly priced at a simple number of shillings (and was not priced in guineas in the first place) was offered at something-and-eleven – even, say, a dining table at 79/11 (three pounds nineteen and eleven, a penny under four quid).
Some of us go back that far …