Brief History of First Ladies and Their Hats, From Martha to Melania

glamour.com:

wore an all-white Hervé Pierre skirt suit, complete with a wide-brimmed hat that will surely go down as one of her most memorable fashion moments as first lady. , as were the verdicts from fashion critics. ( heralded it "fashion diplomacy"; the decreed her style "[evoked] Europe roots, not America First.")There was a similar flurry of discourse when FLOTUS wore her navy wide-brimmed hat inside during her husband's second inauguration ceremony on January 20, 2025. “The hat, a navy and white wide-brim number designed by Eric Javits, might look normal enough off of Melania’s head but, the way she has decided to wear it, resembles an advanced piece of spycraft,” The Cut declared in titled, “Melania Trump Barely Shows Face at the Inauguration.”First Lady Melania Trump in Washington, DC on January 20, 2025.Mrs.

Trump's boater cap follows quite a long line of first ladies who have incorporated memorable headgear into their style while in the White House, either because of etiquette or because they wanted to stand out from the crowd. (Or, in the case of Jacqueline Kennedy, to .)American first ladies beginning with Martha Washington in the late 1700s up until the mid-twentieth-century wore hats as a form of .

Fashion conventions (and tastes) —and by the , it was no longer necessary for women to wear hats in public as a means of being "socially acceptable.""Since the 1960s first ladies who have worn hats are trying to make a fashion statement," Beth Dincuff Charleston, a professor of fashion history at , tells Glamour. "There are moments for a first lady that might call for a head covering, like going to a ceremony for a fallen soldier at Arlington Ceremony—or, if Melania Trump was going to the upcoming royal wedding, I'm sure.