Fruit hat
Encyclopedia
Carmen Miranda
Carmen Miranda, GCIH was a Portuguese-born Brazilian samba singer, Broadway actress and Hollywood film star popular in the 1940s and 1950s. She was, by some accounts, the highest-earning woman in the United States and noted for her signature fruit hat outfit she wore in the 1943 movie The Gang's...
and associated with warm locales. This type of hat has been worn by fashionistas, in films, by comic strip
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....
characters, and for Halloween
Halloween
Hallowe'en , also known as Halloween or All Hallows' Eve, is a yearly holiday observed around the world on October 31, the night before All Saints' Day...
.
History
A fashion report in Los Angeles Times from 1895 called the use of mendiantMendiant
A mendiant is a traditional French confection composed of a chocolate disk studded with nuts and dried fruits representing the four mendicant or monastic orders of the Dominicans, Augustinians, Franciscans and Carmelites...
the "newest trimming" for hats, and noted that hats were "tipped far over the eyes". The Chicago Tribune reported on fruit ribbons, along with feathers, flowers, and frills, as trim for Easter
Easter
Easter is the central feast in the Christian liturgical year. According to the Canonical gospels, Jesus rose from the dead on the third day after his crucifixion. His resurrection is celebrated on Easter Day or Easter Sunday...
hats.
A report on artificial fruit used on hats was in a 1918 edition of the New York Times. Fruit and vegetable trim on "gay hats" featured in the first millinery show of the season at New York's Saks Fifth Avenue in 1941, and overshadowed flowers. Mendiant is a traditional French confection usually prepared during the Christmas season, and composed of a chocolate disk studded with nuts and dried fruits representing the four mendicant or monastic orders of the Dominicans, Augustinians, Franciscans and Carmelites, where the color of the nuts and dried fruits is used refer to the color of monastic robes. Tradition dictates that raisins are used for the Dominicans, hazelnut
Hazelnut
A hazelnut is the nut of the hazel and is also known as a cob nut or filbert nut according to species. A cob is roughly spherical to oval, about 15–25 mm long and 10–15 mm in diameter, with an outer fibrous husk surrounding a smooth shell. A filbert is more elongated, being about twice...
for the Augustins, dried fig
Ficus
Ficus is a genus of about 850 species of woody trees, shrubs, vines, epiphytes, and hemiepiphyte in the family Moraceae. Collectively known as fig trees or figs, they are native throughout the tropics with a few species extending into the semi-warm temperate zone. The Common Fig Ficus is a genus of...
for Franciscan
Franciscan
Most Franciscans are members of Roman Catholic religious orders founded by Saint Francis of Assisi. Besides Roman Catholic communities, there are also Old Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, ecumenical and Non-denominational Franciscan communities....
s and almond for Carmelite.
Lil Picard, a millinery designer for the custom-made department of Bloomingdale's, sought inspiration from nature for her hats and while on vacation "listening to the birds, gazing through the lacy outlines of foliage and watching the ripening fruits, she dreamed of trimmings."
Fruit hats in film
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
ian "bombshell" Carmen Miranda
Carmen Miranda
Carmen Miranda, GCIH was a Portuguese-born Brazilian samba singer, Broadway actress and Hollywood film star popular in the 1940s and 1950s. She was, by some accounts, the highest-earning woman in the United States and noted for her signature fruit hat outfit she wore in the 1943 movie The Gang's...
"made a habit of wearing exotic headdresses/hats often adorned with fruit" and appeared as a singer named Dorita in the 1943 movie The Gang's All Here. The movie included "The Girl in the Tutti Frutti Hat" musical number with women "dressed in frilly tropical attire who manipulated giant bananas at the whims of legendary choreographer Busby Berkeley
Busby Berkeley
Busby Berkeley was a highly influential Hollywood movie director and musical choreographer. Berkeley was famous for his elaborate musical production numbers that often involved complex geometric patterns...
". One reviewer described it as "like a male hairdresser's acid trip
Psychedelic experience
The term "psychedelic experience" is vague – characterized by polyvalence or ambiguity due to its nature – however in modern psychopharmacological science as well as philosophical, psychological, neurological, spiritual-religious and most other ideological discourses it is understood as an altered...
".
Use in marketing
The Chiquita Banana logo was created for United Fruit CompanyUnited Fruit Company
It had a deep and long-lasting impact on the economic and political development of several Latin American countries. Critics often accused it of exploitative neocolonialism and described it as the archetypal example of the influence of a multinational corporation on the internal politics of the...
in 1944 by Dik Browne, who is perhaps best known for his Hägar the Horrible
Hägar the Horrible
Hägar the Horrible is the title and main character of an American comic strip created by cartoonist Dik Browne , and syndicated by King Features Syndicate. It first appeared in February 1973, and was an immediate success. Since Browne's retirement in 1988 , his son Chris Browne has continued the...
comic strip
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....
. In advertising of the 1940s, her voice was supplied by vocalist Patti Clayton followed by Elsa Miranda, June Valli
June Valli
June Valli , the stage name of June Foglia, was an American singer and television personality.Born in the Bronx, Valli was one of the stars of the 1950s television shows Stop the Music and Your Hit Parade. She sang on the show during the show's 1952–1953 season...
and Monica Lewis. The concept was created by a BBDO
BBDO
BBDO is a worldwide advertising agency network, with its headquarters in New York City. The agency began in 1891 with George Batten's Batten Company, and later in 1928, through a merger of BDO and Batten Co. the agency became BBDO...
advertising team headed by Robert Foreman with the song lyrics written by Garth Montgomery and music composed by Ken MacKenzie
Ken MacKenzie
Kenneth Purvis "Ken" MacKenzie is a Canadian former relief pitcher in Major League Baseball. He played for the Milwaukee Braves , New York Mets , St. Louis Cardinals , San Francisco Giants , and Houston Astros . MacKenzie is a member of the Yale Class of 1956...
.
The company later became Chiquita Brands International
Chiquita Brands International
Chiquita Brands International Inc. is an American producer and distributor of bananas and other produce, under a variety of subsidiary brand names, collectively known as Chiquita. Other brands include Fresh Express salads, which it purchased from Performance Food Group in 2005...
and would use a banana wearing a fruit hat headdress on its logo for decades. The original Chiquita Banana advertisement was produced by Disney Studios
Walt Disney Pictures
Walt Disney Pictures is an American film studio owned by The Walt Disney Company. Walt Disney Pictures and Television, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Studios and the main production company for live-action feature films within the Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group, based at the Walt Disney...
and ran in movie theater
Movie theater
A movie theater, cinema, movie house, picture theater, film theater is a venue, usually a building, for viewing motion pictures ....
s.
The inspiration for the Chiquita Banana's hat and character came from Carmen Miranda and her famous fruit hats. A decade before the Miss Chiquita Banana character was born, Carmen Miranda was seen wearing her trademark fruity hats in a number of films.
The banana was transformed into a woman by artist Oscar Grillo, creator of the Pink Panther, in 1987 to reflect "the image the public had of Miss Chiquita as a real person."