"I saw hats in my youth which had very large brims; and when they were turned up, they resembled umbrellas; sometimes they were pulled up, sometimes the brims were reduced by using gances. They were then given the form of a boat. Today the round and bare form seems to be dominant; for the hat is a Proteus which takes all the shapes that one wants to give it."Ask our women who, after so many attempts, have definitively adopted the English hat, despite their antipathy for England; I counsel them to keep them, to ornament them with pearls, diamonds, plumes, cords, ribbons, tassels, buttons, flowers; that the poets in their language should attach stars and comets to them; that women wear them in red, green, black, grey, yellow; but that they keep the English hat; homely women as well as beauties may wear them.
"We have therefore neither pygmy hats nor colossal hats; ladies had raised their coiffures ridiculously, at the moment that men had sported little hats; now that men have augmented them and rounded the volume, coiffures have lowered prodigiously."
- Sebastien MERCIER, Tableaux de Paris, éd. de 1783
