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A playful Surrealist Lobster Hat at the Met Costume Institute

December 24, 2019 Patricia Zohn
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This hat, cherry red in the spirit of the season# and part of the Sandy Schreier collection now on view at the Costume Institute at the Met, was made by Benjamin Green-Field and his sister Bessie for their eponymous hat company Bes-Ben in 1941 (one way perhaps of avoiding prewar anti-Semitism was to add the hyphen?) Known as “the mad hatter of Chicago, it cannot escape notice that his lobster—y confection of surreal playfulness was in the spirit of Dali’s Lobster telephone now on view at MoMA. 

In Fashion Tags Dali, Bes-Ben, hat, Chicago, Met