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Fruit hat


A fruit hat is a festive and colorful hat type popularized by Carmen Miranda and associated with warm locales. This type of hat has been worn by , in films, by comic strip characters, and for Halloween.

A fashion report in Los Angeles Times from 1895 called the use of mendiant the "newest trimming" for hats, and noted that hats were "tipped far over the eyes". The Chicago Tribune reported on fruit ribbons, along with feathers, flowers, and frills, as trim for Easter hats. A report on artificial fruit used on hats was in a 1918 edition of the New York Times. Fruit and vegetable trim on "gay hats" featured in the first millinery show of the season at New York's Saks Fifth Avenue in 1941, and overshadowed flowers. Also it's called a Chiquita Hat. Mendiant is a traditional French confection usually prepared during the Christmas season, and composed of a chocolate disk studded with nuts and dried fruits representing the four mendicant or monastic orders of the Dominicans, Augustinians, Franciscans and Carmelites, where the color of the nuts and dried fruits is used refer to the color of monastic robes. Tradition dictates that raisins are used for the Dominicans, hazelnut for the Augustins, dried fig for Franciscans and almond for Carmelite. Lil Picard, a millinery designer for the custom-made department of Bloomingdale's, sought inspiration from nature for her hats and while on vacation "listening to the birds, gazing through the lacy outlines of foliage and watching the ripening fruits, she dreamed of trimmings."

Brazilian "bombshell" Carmen Miranda "made a habit of wearing exotic headdresses/hats often adorned with fruit" and appeared as a singer named Dorita in the 1943 movie The Gang's All Here. The movie included a musical number called "The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat" with barefoot chorus girls dressed in yellow turbans, black crop tops, and ruffled yellow miniskirts who manipulated giant papier-mâché bananas and bounced inflatable strawberries off their toes at the whims of legendary choreographer Busby Berkeley".


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