Love That Hat! features 47 selections from the AKMP collection of 604 hats, including 179 Quaker head wear items from the Friends Historical Association (FHA) Collection.  These hats reflect Philadelphia's manufacturing retailing and hat fashion over more than 200 years.  Quaker bonnets, a stovepipe top hat, a flapper's cloche, a Jackie Kennedy style pillbox, and more modern hats made by Philadelphia's The S & S Hat Company, evoke stories of their owners, designers, makers or trends of their time.

"Hat styles throughout history have had influence beyond the fashion industry.  Who would have guessed that fantastically feathered hats, such as the pheasant feathered 1901 Bumper-style hat in AKMP's collection, would ignite a national bird conservation campaign that effectively ended the domestic feather trade by 1911," said Cynthia Little, AKMP Historian & Exhibition Manager.

Examples from the FHA Collection at AKMP include an 1860's drawn bonnet of silk and wires worn by Margaret Ely, a Quaker, on the occasion of her marriage to James Rhoads.  Another Jockey-style bonnet from the early 1800's allowed the Quaker woman wearing it no peripheral vision, making a simple road crossing potentially perilous! 

One of the men's hats on display is a homburg hat, characterized by a high creased crown and a narrow curled brim, purchased in the 1950s from John Wanamaker and Company department store by former Philadelphia Mayor, Richardson Dilworth.  Dilworth won a campaign against W. Thatcher Longstreth to serve as mayor from 1956-1962.  Though he sported a fashionable hat for the time, Dilworth is justly remembered as a civic leader, rather than as a style icon.  When asked to comment for writer George Frazier's Esquire article, The Art of Wearing Clothes, he reportedly replied, "I really think that my comments would be very damaging to the article, as I have worn the same type of suit for almost thirty years without variation."