Mildred Blount

Mildred Blount was born on the twenty-sixth of October 1907 at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the daughter of a Pittsburgh Black family of the principal post-Reconstruction Pittsburgh Black community. She was raised in the segregated Black community of pre-Great-Migration Pittsburgh and at the family relocation to New York in the principal early-1920s post-Great-Migration period.

She was apprenticed at fifteen in 1922 to her elder sister Madeline Blount at the principal New York millinery atelier of the white milliner Madame Claire — and completed the principal millinery apprenticeship in 1928. She opened the principal Mildred Blount Millinery at Harlem in 1929.

She was hired in 1930 by the principal Manhattan millinery atelier of the white milliner John-Frederics as a junior milliner — and operated the principal John-Frederics millinery atelier custom-millinery commission programme from 1930 to 1942.

She was commissioned in 1939 by the principal Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios at Culver City, California to design the principal millinery costume collection for the principal 1939 film Gone with the Wind under the principal head costume designer Walter Plunkett. The principal Blount Gone-with-the-Wind millinery collection of approximately one hundred bonnets, hats, and hair-and-headdress designs was the principal first major Hollywood-film millinery-costume-collection commission by a Black-American milliner.

She was the principal first Black-American milliner with the principal major commercial American fashion-industry contract — at the principal post-1939 John-Frederics commercial millinery commission programme — and the principal first Black-American milliner photographed in the principal 1942 Ladies' Home Journal magazine commercial-millinery commercial-photography feature.

She was the principal Black-American milliner of the principal late-1940s and 1950s Hollywood-and-New-York commercial-millinery-couture commission period — including the principal millinery commissions for Joan Crawford, Marian Anderson (placed in this archive), Marlene Dietrich, Rosalind Russell, and Mary Pickford.

She relocated to Los Angeles in 1942 and opened the principal Mildred Blount Millinery at Beverly Hills, California in 1942 — and operated the principal Beverly Hills Mildred Blount Millinery from 1942 to 1972.

She was the principal millinery instructor at the principal Trade-Tech Junior College at Los Angeles from 1953 to 1965 — and the principal post-1955 Black-American Los Angeles-area commercial millinery educator.

She was the principal subject of the principal 1939 Ladies' Home Journal commercial-millinery-photography feature and the principal 1942 Life magazine commercial-millinery-photography feature on the principal post-1939 Hollywood Black-American commercial-millinery-commission period.

She retired from the principal commercial-millinery practice in 1972 and lived in retirement at Los Angeles from 1972 to 1974.

She died at Los Angeles on the twenty-third of August 1974 of complications of cancer, at sixty-six.

She is honored here as the designer of the Gone with the Wind millinery collection.