Sun Umbrellas

Who are those older women stepping down the street, sun umbrellas held aloft as if to imitate Mary Poppins?

“They’re the ones with the brains,” exclaims Edward Meader, curator of costumes and textiles for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The innocent question has Meader on a roll. He wants to tell all about the history of the item, and to defend the quixotic accessorizing tastes of the older generation that prefers umbrellas to other forms of sun protection.

“Why, tanning is terrible for your skin,” Meader goes on. “In the 19th Century, no woman would dream of not carrying a parasol to shield her face from the sun.”

Obviously, times have changed. These days, hats and sun-block creams have all but replaced them. And even people who avoid the sun want to look as if they don’t.

As for the defiant women who cling to their sun umbrellas, they are all of a certain age--most often over age 50--and live in the city’s ethnic neighborhoods, such as Chinatown and the Fairfax district, where many residents are natives of countries that still make active use of parasols, umbrellas, or both.

“And while we’re at it, there is a distinct difference between them,” Meader notes. “Only in the 1920s did the words become interchangeable.”

It’s true, parasols are for the sun, umbrellas are for the rain--though not in Los Angeles--and parasols predate umbrellas by centuries, starting with visual references in the art of Mesopotamia, about 600 BC.

Much later, Marie Antoinette and King Louis paraded with their parasols in the French sunshine of 1780, while an Englishman named Jonas Hanway devised the first water-repellent parasol and dubbed it an umbrella. He was laughed off the rain-slicked streets of London, and it took some time for Hanway’s invention to catch on. By 1787, umbrellas were seen popping up with some regularity.

The Japanese version of the parasol, a resin-coated paper affair, made its Western debut in the 1880s. This was the beginning of the hybridization of sun shades and rain shields. By the 1920s, umbrella had become the all-purpose word for both.

All very interesting, but it doesn’t explain, exactly, why only the older generations carry them now, at least in Los Angeles.

Leave it to a New Yorker to have a theory about that. It’s the same explanation he gives for why only older New York women carry umbrellas.

“It’s an older generation that knows about them and is accustomed to them,” says Gilbert Center, manager of Uncle Sam’s Umbrella Shop in New York City, who has seen a gradual increase in parasol sales there in the past several years.

Center says the revival is due to an increased concern about skin cancer, but that the new customer is still an older woman.

He maintains that the parasol’s enduring popularity with Oriental customers nationwide is because they are still used overseas and, therefore, not a fashion oddity. He also maintains that the reason young people aren’t flocking to stores such as his for their emollient-free sun screen is simple. “It hasn’t been promoted as a fashion item.”