Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Busby (military headdress)
Summary
Busby is the English name for the Hungarian prémes csákó ('fur shako') or kucsma, a military head-dress made of fur, originally worn by Hungarian hussars. In its original Hungarian form the busby was a cylindrical fur cap, having a bag of coloured cloth hanging from the top. This bag could be filled with sand and the end attached to the right shoulder as a defence against sabre cuts.
The popularity of the military headdress in its hussar form reached a height in the years immediately before World War I (1914–1918). It was widely worn in the Belgian (Guides and field artillery), British (hussars, yeomanry, and horse artillery), Dutch (cavalry and artillery), Italian (light cavalry) German (hussars), Russian (hussars),, Serbian (Royal Guard) and Spanish (hussars and mounted cazadores) armies. Several armies have continued to use the headdress as a part of their full dress uniforms.
There were some variations in the materials of which cavalry busbies were made. Russian Cossacks of the Imperial Guard used black sheepskin, Guard Hussars dark brown long-haired fur, and line Hussars black lambswool. All but one of the twenty Prussian Hussar regiments wore sealskin busbies dyed in black, while their officers favoured dark brown otter-skin. The Brunswick Hussar Regiment No. 17 had the distinction of being issued busbies made of bearskin.
Possibly the name's original sense of a "busby wig" came from association with Richard Busby, headmaster of Westminster School in the late seventeenth century; the phrase buzz wig may have supplied the derivation for busby. An alternative explanation is that the British hussar cap of the early 19th century was named after the hatter who supplied the officer's version—W. Busby of the Strand London.
The Canadian Forces dress instructions authorise the busby as a part of the full dress uniform for hussars, artillery and rifle regiments.
The historic busby is still worn by ceremonial detachments of the Dutch Hussars and Royal Gendarmerie (Koninklijke Marchaussee) in full dress uniform.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.