Frill seekers

Graceful and practical in equal measure, the parasol has a long and colourful history when it comes to creating shade. Deborah Nicholls-Lee takes cover

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ONCE held aloft for rulers and royalty, the parasol is thought to have protected the privileged from the sun for 4,000 years before the English adopted it. 'From its first appearance, the parasol was associated with rank, as it was carried over, rather than by, the person it shaded,' writes Jeremy Farrell in Umbrellas & Parasols (1986). Originally made of broad leaves, paper or feathers, they were popular with Egyptian nobles, Assyrian monarchs and Chinese emperors, with status conferred by the size or the number of tiers. In precolonial Burma, it was the quantity and colour of the parasols carried that conveyed your social standing.

According to Mr Farrell, the earliest evidence of the parasol on British soil is an inventory penned for Mary, Queen of Scots in 1561, where a fringed canopy of crimson satin 'serving to mak Schaddow afoir the Quene' is listed among her possessions. The portable parasol then makes sporadic appearances in the trousseau of Catherine of Braganza, for example, when she married Charles II in 1662; and, in fiction, we have the hero of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) fashioning one from skins on his desert island. The French took to the parasol with some enthusiasm in the 18th century, taking their cue from fashion arbiter Madame de Pompadour, who would inspire the marquise model. In Paris, parasols were even rented out so people could peacock along the Pont Neuf.