'It seems as if hatboxes needn’t always contain hats: ideas can percolate there, too'

In a watercolour of 1804 by the English artist Craig William Marshall, a salesman walks along London’s Bond Street. A long pole is balanced on his shoulder, strung with an assortment of pastel-coloured hatboxes that swing cheerfully as he strides. Millinery was booming at the time this scene was painted. Fashionable ladies sought out large, structured bonnets fastened with a long ribbon and gentlemen wore top hats made of silk plush or felted fur. This expanding population of hats needed a home when they weren’t on heads — so firms or itinerant sellers, such as the pole-bearing peddler, found a trade in boxes of metal, wood or leather, as well as pasteboard boxes covered in wallpaper or fabric. Some custom-made boxes featured the owner’s initials; others were secured with a key. The fancier the hatbox, the more the business stood out.

By the Regency, the containers (sometimes called ‘bandboxes’, having once housed the stiff bands of starched muslin or linen worn as collars in the 1600s) had become almost as much of a status symbol as the hats themselves. In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the mercurial Lydia, who has squandered money on an unbecoming hat, declares: ‘I am glad I bought my bonnet, if it is only for the fun of having another band-box!’ As hats grew bigger — topped with flowers, exotic feathers and fruit — the hatbox became ever larger. In a journal published in 1820, the American chemist Benjamin Silliman recalled a journey by horse-drawn carriage to Birmingham made hugely uncomfortable by the ‘huge band-boxes’ carried on the laps of his fellow passengers. ‘I was obliged to sit sideways, with one arm out of the coach,’ he wrote: a ‘situation so uncomfortable’ that he hopped onto the roof instead.

The Victorian era heralded new travel opportunities via railway or steamship and, as noted in the V&A Museum’s online archive, ‘hatboxes were used for travel as well as for storage’ and ‘covered in foreign stamps and luggage labels documenting their owners’ travels’. For bonnets, rope handles that both secured the box and functioned as a handle became more common, whereas top hats were transported in leather, bucket-shaped boxes, sometimes with a storage space for a hat brush, and lined with soft fabrics, such as satin, velvet or silk. In some ways, the hatbox was the precursor to modern luggage. As a pamphlet produced in 1960 by the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, US, notes: ‘Ladies used the boxes not only for their bonnets, but as portable storage compartments for ribbons, artificial flowers and hair pieces, dresses, jewelry and the thousand and one bagatelles so dear to the feminine heart.’ To cater for different occasions, some boxes accommodated several hats at once. One wooden example (dated about 1900–25) at the V&A contains six — from a cotton cap with a scalloped frill to a blue velvet bonnet trimmed with lace, coins, flowers and feathers.

Little wonder that, by the 1840s, railway porters had begun charging extra to carry them. Well-meaning Victorians dispensed advice on travelling with hats. ‘A bonnet will look better after a journey if the flowers or feathers are taken out and carried separately in a paper box, and the strings are smoothly rolled, not folded, upon pasteboard,’ counselled etiquette expert Sarah Annie Frost in The Art of Dressing Well, published in the 1870s. She adds: ‘A bonnet or hat should always be dusted with a bonnet-brush and covered with an old silk handkerchief when placed in the band-box. A stand should be always in the box to prevent the bonnet resting on any part of the trimming.’ And do take care which bonnet you wear en route. ‘Any fancy material, lace or velvet, is in excessively bad taste in a travelling hat,’ she warns.

Hatboxes continued to capture the imagination as a new century dawned, becoming vessels of high drama. In A. A. Milne’s comedic play of 1923, The Man in the Bowler Hat: A Terribly Exciting Affair, a series of cloakroom tickets hidden in hatboxes around London leads to the precious ‘Rajah’s Ruby’. In Val Andrews’s Conan Doyle-inspired The Torment of Sherlock Holmes (published in 1999), a large brown hatbox in the left luggage at Victoria Station, ‘obviously originally the property of a lady of means’, is found to contain a butcher’s knife and a bloodstained silk gown. The hatbox may also have played Cupid. George Bernard Shaw was besotted with the actress Stella Campbell, the original Eliza in Pygmalion. According to one apocryphal story, in a theatrical attempt to woo her, he sent her a hatbox full of flowers with a romantic note tucked inside. A witty exchange of letters followed that lasted 40 years. Upon Campbell’s death, a hatbox was discovered beneath her bed, their tender correspondence kept for eternity.

Some hatboxes are instantly recognisable: the pristine white boxes of Royal Warrant holders Lock & Co of St James’s Street, SW1, the world’s oldest hatters, for example. With their smart black trim and logo full of swirls and flourishes, they are cherished objects in themselves, connecting buyers with an illustrious history of distinguished patrons, from Admiral Lord Nelson to Elizabeth II. Although Society events, such as Royal Ascot and Henley Royal Regatta, still keep Lock & Co busy, millinery more generally has declined since the popularisation of the motor car in the 1920s, which provided a roof to fend off the elements and left little space for a hat atop a head. When peace was declared in 1945, the freedom from uniform led people to cast off their hats in favour of more casual apparel. Later, the rise of youth culture in the 1950s and 1960s saw the new generation reject the traditional dress codes of their parents. Hatboxes were still needed for formal wear, but began to take different forms.

Hexagonal boxes were easier to dismantle, meaning that they could be shipped flat, and the advent of plastic saw transparent boxes come onto the market, enabling people to find a given hat at a glance. The Empty Box Company, however, is keeping tradition alive, and has been creating handmade hatboxes in its Devon workshop since 1988. It was a Christy’s top-hat box found in a gentleman’s tailor shop in Norwich that inspired co-founders Giselle Hulme and James Teague, who realised the rarity of these charming vessels. Today, striped boxes and William Morris designs are their bestsellers. Their circular hatbox ‘has a traditional yet timeless feel to it, with ribbon, either tied to the lid, or from the base, to tie as a bow on top, to give that Edwardian feel of unwrapping and revealing something very special inside,’ points out Ms Hulme, who trims the inside with lace and uses pH-neutral board and acid-free tissue paper to prevent discolouration.

Memorable commissions include window displays for Harrods and the hatboxes in Rose’s wedding trousseau in Downton Abbey. Customers also use their hatboxes as memory boxes, gift boxes or home storage. In 1905, a frustrated Canadian writer stowed a rejected novel in one. Two years later, lifting the lid on the box, she rediscovered the manuscript and tried anew. The author was L. M. Montgomery, and the book was Anne of Green Gables, an immediate bestseller. It seems as if hatboxes needn’t always contain hats: ideas can percolate there, too.

This feature originally appeared in the February 18, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.