The Bonnet's Evolution

Bonnets are a nice quiet indicator of period when you're trying to date a photograph - the deep, face-framing early Victorian shape is almost unrecognizable next to the small, jauntily tilted bonnets of the later century.

The relationship to hairstyle is direct and worth tracing decade by decade. In the early Victorian period, hair is worn low, smoothed close to the head with a center part and looped over the ears - and the bonnet of the same years matches that closeness, a deep, curved brim that frames the face tightly and shields it almost entirely in profile, echoing the soft, modest silhouette the whole outfit is going for underneath. As hairstyles gradually lift and gain volume through the crinoline and bustle years - chignons, braids, and eventually the elaborate upswept styles of the 1870s and '80s - the bonnet has to shrink and tilt backward to make room, moving from something that encloses the face to something perched decoratively on top of the head, often little more than a small platform of trim held on with ribbons tied under the chin.

By the 1890s the process is essentially complete: hats (by this point often genuinely hats rather than bonnets, sitting on top of increasingly voluminous hairstyles rather than framing the face) had grown larger and more structural again, but for entirely different reasons than the deep early-Victorian shape - decorative height and presence rather than modest enclosure. I like using bonnets as a dating tool for exactly this reason: because the shape is responding to two things at once, prevailing hairstyle and prevailing silhouette philosophy, tracking one almost automatically tracks the other. A photograph with a deep, close bonnet is very unlikely to be later than the 1850s; a small, tilted confection perched forward on a high pile of hair is almost certainly the 1870s or later. It's a small detail that ends up being one of the more reliable ones in the whole wardrobe.