Alfred Solomon, 104, Milliner and Horseplayer
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Alfred Solomon, who died Saturday, just weeks before his 105th birthday, was a milliner who brought Parisian fashion to ladies’ hats at mid-century. An avid horseplayer as well, he was enough of a fixture at Saratoga that the track named an opening-day race after him.
The son of a lighting-fixture salesman, Solomon grew up in New York and by the early 1930s was working as a hat designer in the Garment District. In the early 1940s, together with his sister, Janet Sloan, Solomon founded Madcaps.
After World War II, the company began designing hats modeled on French couture, taking inspiration from such designers as Givenchy and Yves St. Laurent. A visitor to the Madcaps showroom on West 39th Street in 1958 found “chenille wigs, chefs’ hats made of net, fencers’ masks in coarse veiling, pique mob caps, domes and fezes in every material from satin to leather.” Solomon and his sister would visit Paris each year to catch up on the newest colors and designs. In later years, they ventured farther a field, to Milan, Tokyo, and Hong Kong.
For more than 50 years, Solomon spent the month of August at Saratoga, taking in the thoroughbred season from his private box. He was a well-known character at the track, and was once described by the Associated Press as “looking like a Damon Runyon throwback in his straw fedora and puffing on a cigar while perusing the Daily Racing Form.”
Asked last year for his longevity formula, he told a reporter, “A cigar and a bourbon a day, and an orgasm a week.”
Other vigorous activity seems to have had something to do with it, too; Solomon continued to play golf past age 100.
Working at his hat business until he was 95, Solomon split his time between a Manhattan apartment and Madcaps Farm, a 286-acre spread in Gansevoort. The farm was enclosed by a unique fence, with each post surmounted by a different hat form.
At one point he boarded a trotter at the farm that he named with his own moniker: “The Duke of Gansevoort.”
He was a benefactor of Yaddo, the artists’ colony, and of Skidmore College, and the National Museum of Racing in Saratoga Springs. His portrait hangs near the entrance to the museum gift shop, which is named for Solomon and his wife.
Alfred Zins Solomon
Born September 25, 1899, in New York City; died September 4 at Saratoga Hospital; his wife, Nancy Skelton, died in 1982.