Hats off to Vanilla Beane!

I'm not much of a hat wearer.

When I'm out walking, I almost always have a ballcap on to shade my eyes. (Blue eyed downside: light sensitivity.) And in winter, if, baby, it's cold outside, I've got a warm knit cap scrunched down around my ears. But a hat hat? It's been a while.

Still, whether it's the chapeaux worn by British and Irish wedding goers, or the church-lady hats that a lot of Black church ladies wear to their services, I really enjoy seeing pictures of women wearing hats.

Since I don't go to church, or British or Irish weddings - except in one instance, when I went to a wedding in Ireland but didn't step it up and get a hat, I don't have much of a need for advanced millinery.

But since I do like hats, I was interested in reading the Washington Post obituary of Mrs. Vanilla Beane, a DC hat-maker who lived one hell of a life before passing away on October 23rd at the age of 103. Up until her 100th year, she was working six days a week. Let me repeat that. Up until her 100th year, she was working six days a week.

What a life she led!

Vanilla Powell grew up in North Carolina, in a family of modest means. Her father was a carpenter, her mother a seamstress who also made money doing laundry. (For White people, it almost goes without saying.) Vanilla was the second from last in a family with nine kids, so maybe they were running out of standard, vanilla names when Vanilla came along. But somehow she was named Vanilla.

Like the other kids in her family, she picked tobacco and cotton to supplement the family's income. And went to church on Sunday, where the church ladies were wearing fancy hats. 

Vanilla graduated from high school, and, for a young Black women in North Carolina during the Depression, that must have been quite an accomplishment. She then moved to Washington DC, where she met and married Willie Beane, providing her with a to-die-for name: Vanilla Beane. 

In Washington, Mrs. Beane worked as an elevator operator in a downtown building with a hat store called Washington Millinery Supply. She was enamored by the intricate hats and the craft of making them, so she bought some supplies and began making them herself. (Source: Washington Post)

Elevator operator was, of course, one of the few jobs open back then to "colored women." When I was a kid, the nice department stores in downtown Worcester had elevator operators, all smartly dressed Black women who wore white gloves. They pressed the button for the floor you requested, and opened and closed the elevator grate. Each car had a little fold down seat in it, where the operator could sit if she wasn't operating the elevator. I was quite fascinated by these little seats for some reason. I'd look at them and think what a wonderful job elevator operator must be.

Eventually she showed her hats to the store’s owner, Richard Dietrick Sr. “She had very much talent, but she didn’t have the design know-how in those days,” Dietrick recalled later. “She picked it up very quickly.”

Mrs. Beane eventually began working for him, and when he moved his shop to Gaithersburg, Md., she bought his supplies and, in 1979, opened her own store. She was a shrewd businesswoman, convincing Ethel Sanders, the owner of Lovely Lady Boutique in Bethesda, Md., to move her store near Bené Millinery.

And what a business Vanilla Beane built for herself.

Mrs. Beane’s hats, which she had designed and fabricated at the Bené Millinery and Bridal Supplies shop on Third Street NW, were featured on postage stamps and in collections at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Every hat was one-of-a-kind.

“Nobody wants to walk into a church and see someone else wearing their hat,” she once said.

Poet Maya Angelou wore one of Mrs. Beane’s millinery creations. Civil rights activist Dorothy I. Height donned them for meetings with presidents and other officials. “Hats give me a lift and make me feel real special,” Height explained — a sentiment shared by the countless others who shopped at Mrs. Beane’s store.

Here's Vanilla Beane modeling one of her creations. When she was about 100 years of age. 

Wow! That's what I call a hat!

It takes presence, style, and guts to wear a hat like that, and Vanilla Beane apparently had plenty of all that. 

Mrs. Beane made her hats the old-fashioned way, wetting buckram — a stiff cotton — into molds decorated with all manner of fabrics. Keeping her fingernails cut short, Mr. Beane made tams, turbans, panamas, sailors and cloches. Decades of the repetitive fashioning turned her fingers stiff and rough.

“They look like I have been digging potatoes,” she said.

In addition to folks who wore Mrs. Beane's creations, there were those who collected them.  Sherry Watkins was one of the collectors. She owns 75 Beane creations. (I was going to say Beanies, but these hats are obviously so much more.)

There are, wouldn't you know, rules for hat wearing, and Beane was a proud evangelizer of them. She tutored Watkins on the ins and outs of hats. 

“Don’t match the hat to the outfit,” Watkins recalled. “Just buy a hat you like and the outfit will come. Never wear your hat more than one inch above your eyebrows. Slant it to look more interesting and possibly even risque.”

Love that first bit of advice. Right up there with 'don't buy a work of art because it matches your couch.'

In addition to her obituary in the WaPo, Vanilla Beane's death was also noted in USA Today and on NPR, among other sites.

Not bad for a girl who once picked tobacco in North Carolina.

Visiting the National Museum of African American History and Culture is on my bucket list, and seeing some of Vanilla Beane's works of art is now on my bucket list within a bucket list.

Hats off to Vanilla Beane! They don't make 'em like they used to: hats, or folks like Vanilla Beane.