All the Rage

Stratford Mail

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In 1787 Thomas Lee Shippen, an American student at Inner Temple, London, shipped a hat to his sister Anne Home Livingston in Philadelphia. Nancy, as she was called by kith and kin, was living at Shippen House with her parents after her marriage to a scoundrel with a taste for scandal and no taste for divorce fell through. Tommy Shippen was a bon vivant and a bit of a clothes horse, writing home from London: "I am so transformed already by dress that you would hardly know me, curls to my hair, round hat, raven's gray coat, black satin vest," etc. Tommy was keen on the latest fashion, and keen to lift the spirits of his melancholy sister with a magnificent bit of millinery fresh from the frontlines where Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, set the standard. If not for the droll prose penned in exposition of the hat by their uncle Arthur Lee, the transit of this hat from London to New York to Philadelphia might have escaped notice. Tune in this month to track the itinerary of the grandest, most anticipated hat in human history!

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