Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, the famous English photographer, captured images of women wearing bonnets in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Thanks to these photographs we are able to see the patterns of the cloth, the evolution of the bonnets and the very practical reasons why they became everyday wear for women working on the farm as well as in the fishing industries.
This essay and accompanying photographs come for iTextilis, an invaluable resource for anyone interested in culture and history as told through textiles.
(Image courtesy of Whitby Museum and iTextilis. Used under Creative Commons licence.)