Thousand Dollar Chinchilla Hat
By
Dorothy Verrill
The Hartford
Courant; Jan 8, 1950; pg. SM14
California is fortunate in many respects, among them the
fact that its efficient Governor, Earl Warren, has an extraordinarily pretty
wife, who is not only a charming and attractive person face-to-face, but very
easy on a camera lens, despite the
fact that she has raised a large family and is twice a grandmother. Other
interesting and unique aspects of California's
advantages over other states include
the scope of its successful crops,
which range from fish to furs, from palms to potatoes, from
movies to minerals and from chickens
to chinchillas. As a matter of rather
surprising fact, the balmy climate
of Southern California yields a
bumper crop of luxuriously furred creatures, including not only mink in all its
mutations, but the precious fur of the Peruvian chinchillas, transplanted from the
lofty altitudes of their native Andes
to the wide open spaces of Gardena,
outside of Los Angeles, and doing so well, under modern scientific care, that the tiny animals, once faced with extinction, now
yield enough peltry to make chinchilla again available as a fashion item.
At Gardena
a group of fur farmers, pooling their
resources and know-how under the
name of the Allied Distributors,
have what they consider the largest fur farm in the
world, devoted exclusively to mutation and ranch minks and the fabulous chinchillas. Their ranch covers 10
acres and is as spic and span as a New England kitchen, each little cage of fur
yielding animals tended as carefully as a millionaire's child, and each creature
given the utmost in modern
scientific diet and other treatments
calculated to promote rich,
beautifully colored and lustrous pelts of the
most luxurious type. There are literally thousands of these
pampered creatures at Gardena,
but the chinchillas are the acknowledged aristocrats of the ranch, the
leaders and the pride of their owners. Consequently it was the fur of chinchillas that the
fur farmers chose as a Christmas gift to the
beautiful Mrs. Warren, and after selecting their
prize skins, carefully matched by their
own expert, Andre de Vajda of Beverly Hills, (who has been furrier to European
royalty and knows what chinchillas should be) the
"chinchilla men" of Allied Distributors commissioned
Keneth Hopkins of Beverly Hills to design a hat for Mrs. Warren, using their
furs.
Keneth Hopkins, famous California millinery stylist
had never made a hat for Mrs. Warren before, although his clients include top
movie, radio and theater stars as
well as Los Angeles society, but he studied portraits of Mrs. Warren and the current Christmas card sent out by the Governor and his family, which shows the entire group and their
pets, beautifully drawn by the
eldest son, and depicting Mrs. Warren in a fur hat —purely imaginary. Mr. Hopkins
then went to work, and designed a
modified chechia, to be worn, side tilted in profile style, its brim entirely
of the silvers-gray chinchillas, a
crown of gray velvet, and for adornment a great cluster of crimson roses with
rich green foliage, posed to fall against the
cheek. The roses were suggested by the
fact that the chinchilla farmers, in
sending their Christmas gift to the First Lady of California, expressed the hope that she would wear it to the Tournament of Roses at Pasadena “and on many other
occasions in a Happy New Year”. Roses also, combined
with chinchilla, typify the varied
crops of California.
The hat reached Mrs. Warren by air and special messenger on Christmas day—she
tried it on and found it completely
becoming, wondered how Keneth Hopkins
had done it without seeing her, decided to wear it to the
Rose Bowl festivities with a black costume and short black Persian lamb coat.
The hat is valued at $1000, for a chinchilla coat costs close to $100,000
still. It is one gift that had no duplicate in any stocking or under any tree
this holiday season.
1 comment:
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