Object-ives #7: Why I Still Want a Delia’s Bucket Hat

I find comfort in my 90s catalog collection

Oct 17, 2025

4 retro Delia's catalogs — Molly Cameron’s Delia’s catalog collection

It was the end of the school day. I filed out of our classroom behind Megan. Megan was our eighth-grade class president, more sporty than girly, and she was one of the most popular girls in school. She wore a light blue bucket hat with a small dolphin embroidered on the front. It was a cool hat, and since Megan was wearing it, it was a very cool hat.

“Hey, Megan, where did you get that hat?” I asked timidly. We were on the same soccer team, but I still didn’t know how to have unstructured conversation with her.

“Delia’s,” she replied, barely opening her mouth. “It’s a catalog.”

Delia’s. A catalog. I tucked this little piece of information away, determined to get this catalog for myself.

This was 1997 so there was no way to learn any more information beyond asking more friends if they knew about this elusive Delia’s catalog. Turns out my friend Sophie did, which made sense. She went to a private junior high school in another town, and even though she wore a uniform to school, she and her private school friends always seemed to have cooler clothes than me. Sophie gave me a subscription card and soon enough I got my very own catalog in the mail: the Summer 1997 edition. The cover featured a closeup on a smiling girl with straight blonde hair wearing the bucket hat. I sat at the kitchen table and devoured the catalog front to back like a novel.

The clothes in Delia’s (or dELiA*s, as the company officially formatted their name) were made exclusively for teen girls and the mail-order-only aspect gave it even more of an insider quality. It felt very elite to pick up the phone and call a 1-800 number to order clothing, then wait patiently for it to arrive in the mail. Those occasions turned out to be rare for me anyway. My mom bought my clothes from more affordable places like JCPenney and thought Delia’s was too expensive. She deemed items like the bucket hat too frivolous. I could only buy something from Delia’s if I had saved up enough babysitting money or if it was from one of their biannual deep-discount sales. But the catalogs themselves became just as important as the clothes as I imagined entire worlds within those square pages.

Delia’s models were always having fun and never posed the way other models did. They were thin and conventionally attractive with perfect skin, but they didn’t seem to know it. They seemed to just be hanging out somewhere fun and a photographer happened to catch it. They stuck out their tongues, pulled at their hair, leaned down to scratch their knees, stared up at something above them. We didn’t even know where they were, since they were always shot against a solid white background. The pages were green screens for my imagination. They could be anywhere I wanted them to be, and I could be there with them. I could be a popular girl too.

I saved every catalog that arrived and kept them in the best condition I could. I would “read” them in bed at night like they were magazines, accidentally learning a lot about fabric blends and inseam measurements. Imagining myself in those clothes, with those cool girls as my friends, helped me sleep better. I dreamed of being someone new.

Visiting my parents recently, I attempted to clean out a drawer in my childhood bedroom when I found what remained of my stash: four Delia’s catalogs, slightly worn and faded but otherwise preserved. One of them was the Summer 1997 issue that started my obsession, featuring the bucket hat. A thrill tingled through me. I spread them all out on the carpet and read each one cover to cover. I recognized all the models as if they had been old friends and remembered so many articles of clothing that I had lusted after. The floral-print ringer tee. The long green plaid skirt. The platform flip-flops. I put the catalogs in a Ziploc freezer bag and brought them home with me to Queens.

Back home, I found myself doing the same thing I had done as a teenager: flipping through each one and imagining myself in all the clothes and all the possible scenarios those clothes might find me in. I’m only a little embarrassed to admit that, yes, I would still wear a lot of these outfits that were made for teen girls in the 90s. I’m more embarrassed to admit that in weak moments (late at night, a couple cocktails deep) I find myself searching eBay and Etsy with phrases like “delias henley striped” and “roxy jeans wide leg 90s.”

I somehow missed it when the Delia’s brand relaunched through Dolls Kill in 2018, banking on 90s nostalgia to once again sell pastel baby tees and flares. Looking at press mentions of the collaboration now, the clothes feel slightly off, like I can see all the effort behind them. I still want the original, zero effort, Megan-barely-speaking-from-under-her-bucket-hat versions. I know that even if I were to find these items, they would likely be poorly made and not fit my adult body well, but I can’t shake the dream. I’m a 42-year-old woman who finally has the money to give my 14-year-old self the things that she desperately wanted.

Thanks to the glass rectangle in my pocket, I can imagine myself a part of almost any world whenever I want. I scroll lazily through #ootd posts on Instagram or, when I really want to disassociate, through the zero-context world of Pinterest. But I still find myself popping open the Ziploc bag and spreading out the catalogs every month or so. There is still comfort in that analog world of possibilities where I could wear anything and be anyone.

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