Congolese Headdresses, Lily Dache and the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Click below to read a fascinating article by Wendy A. Grossman about the global travels of head gear and ideas.
It begins, “In 1974, The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute received a unique bequest of forty-seven prestige caps and headdresses from Central Africa’s Congo River basin. This gift came from Lilly Daché, the French-American milliner whose inventive designs dominated the American and French fashion scene from the 1930s through the 1950s.”
And Grossman goes on to explain the conversation at the time over the influence of Congolese style on fashion and art. It was not always a pleasant conversation as you will read because of racist ideas about which cultures were civilized and which were not.
https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/articles/2022/9/mode-au-congo
