Snood (headgear)

Uncommon card · No. 199508

A snood () is a type of traditionally female headgear, with two types known. The long-gone Scottish snood was a circlet made of ribbon worn by young Scottish women as a symbol of chastity. In the 1590s, Elizabeth Gibb made snoods of Florentine silk ribbon for the gentlewomen at the court of Anne of Denmark (the wife of King James VI of Scotland). The other type sought to hold the hair in a cloth or net-like hat. In the most common form, the headgear resembles a close-fitting hood worn over the back of the head. It is similar to a hairnet, but a snood typically has a looser fit. Decorative hairnets, popular among women in the Victorian era, were referred to as snoods. This term was then applied to any netlike hat, and, in the 1930s, to a net bag headgear. This latter meaning became popular during the Second World War of 1939 to 1945, when women joined the workforce en masse and often had to wear headgear to avoid their hair getting caught by the moving parts of factory machinery. For a...

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