A capeline is a hat with a brim so wide that it becomes less a head covering than a personal architecture of shade — a circle of felt, straw, or fabric that projects outward from the face to a diameter that can exceed two feet.
The term comes from the Italian cappellina, meaning a small hat, but the capeline is anything but small. Its defining characteristic is a soft, floppy brim — in contrast to the rigid brims of top hats or boaters — that can be shaped, turned up, turned down, or pinned according to the wearer’s whim. The capeline emerged in the early twentieth century as millinery adopted the broad, soft brims that would come to define the golden age of hat-making between 1900 and 1930.
The capeline reached its apotheosis in the 1920s, when it was worn by the protagonists of silent cinema and the readers of Vogue as the definitive hat of the Jazz Age. The capeline’s broad brim provided a frame for the face that was both dramatic and versatile: tilted down over one eye for mystery, pushed back for frankness, pinned up on one side for asymmetry. The hat was an instrument of facial composition, and the capeline was its most expressive form.
The capeline declined with the general retreat of hat-wearing in the mid-twentieth century, but it survives in the world of racing and weddings — at Royal Ascot, at the Kentucky Derby, at the spring exhibitions of high-fashion millinery, where the capeline is revived each season as a testament to the art of hat-making and the pleasure of wearing a gesture of shade the diameter of an outstretched arm.
