Wm. Booth Draper at the Sign of the Unicorn

Some notes on hat color in the 18th century. Hardly a week goes by without someone asking me about the color range of hats available in the Revolutionary War period. For most times and places, the choice of hat color was like Ford’s Model T- you could have any color you wanted so long as it was black. There were a few exceptions, which I’ll detail below, but for most men in Anglo-American contexts, black hats were the norm. Hatters of the period dyed their hats with a combination of logwood, copperas, and verdigris. The hat bodies were boiled in the dye at least twice and sometimes as many as four or five times for the better sort of hats. Logwood is an unstable dyestuff, however, and hats frequently turned a sort of rusty color (sometimes with a greenish cast) after prolonged exposure to sunlight. Indeed, many original surviving hats today have a brownish tinge to them. People have mistakenly guessed that these hats were brown originally, but this is likely not the case. At the same time, period hats were stiffened with glue or gum Senegal (or gum Arabic), which tended to migrate to the hat’s surface as it aged, and produced whitish splotches.

White hats were occasionally worn by men in hot climates (or as summer wear in more northerly locations). They appear in images of the West Indies, and occasionally in descriptions of runaways in the American south. For the most part, however, only women and boys wore white hats. These were usually made of white rabbit fur, and given a nap.

Not until the early 19th century did brown, drab, and white hats become commonplace for men’s daywear.