HISTORY
dyed black. As rules for mourning existed not only for dress, but for all aspects of social behaviour, women anxious to avoid a faux pas turned to ladies’ magazines – and to their dressmakers and milliners – for expert advice. One such expert was Anna Ben-Yùsuf, a German-born milliner who enjoyed a remarkable career in the United States during the second half of the 19th century. Born in Berlin in 1844 as Anna Hermine Kind, she moved to London as a young woman, where she met and married an Algerian named Mustafa Ben Yùsuf. They had four daughters, but the marriage failed. After her divorce, she eventually emigrated to the USA, where she found work as a milliner in Boston. She later moved to New York, where she was employed as a millinery teacher at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute from September 1905 onwards. In 1907, she resigned to found her own millinery school. In 1909, the year of her death, she wrote a reference book on millinery techniques, The Art of Millinery: Practical Lessons for the Artiste and the Amateur2. The book contained a series of lessons, each dealing with a particular aspect of millinery and ending with a number of examination questions. It included a comprehensive chapter about mourning etiquette and all the aspects of creating mourning headwear.
2 A revised edition was reprinted as Edwardian Hats: The Art of Millinery in 1992
Mourning dress, 1832 Court and General mourning
Those who could not afford to buy new mourning clothes took their ordinary clothes to a professional
silk dyer to be dyed black
Mourning attire was not only worn for family members or close friends, but also for royal deaths. Following the death of a royal, the court would go into mourning and a period of General Mourning would be declared. Queen Victoria wore mourning for forty years following the sudden death of Prince Albert from typhoid fever in 1861. She was forty-two at the time. It is reported that as soon as news of the death of Prince Albert spread, crowds of buyers flocked to the specialised mourning stores in major cities to buy their “blacks”. During Victoria’s reign, mourning became something of a cult, permeating all aspects of society in a way that is hard to imagine today. It was also Queen Victoria who reintroduced the white Marie Stuart-style widow’s cap featuring a V-point shape over the forehead, after the portrait of the widowed Mary, Queen of Scots. She wore this style for the rest of her life, and most of her widowed subjects followed her example. In the second half of the 19th
century, the fashion for elegant mourning dress was just as
established in the United States as it was in Great Britain, particularly in larger cities where the upper and middle classes had access to fashion magazines. The more mourning wear followed fashion, the less likely these clothes were to be kept and reused, as they would be outdated after a couple of years. Those who could not afford to buy new, fashionable clothes for each new period of mourning sold their widow’s weeds to other
Mourning bonnet Ireland, 1850s
Queen Victoria with Mary Stuart cap, 1862
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