Spring’s millinery season is full swing and Melbourne Racing Club, first to bring top designers and glamourous racegoers together ahead of its gala Caulfield Cup week, October 11-18, officially launched last night
Photographs: Monty Coles, www.theloupe.org
Words: Janice Breen Burns, www.voxfrock.com.au
Jill Humphries fashions hats like little birds, smooth and pretty and often black, with “wings” that twist up and flick out, she says; “Like a kind of eyelash.” They’re light as air, most of them, anchored to a band or elastic, fixed soft against a woman’s forehead, slightly above her right eye. Their proportions, so neat and small (the size of a fist), are bang on trend for spring millinery 2014. “They’re more natural,” Humphries says. “More like an extension of the girl.”
Jill Humphries of Jill and Jack: “MORE LIKE AN EXTENSION OF THE GIRL….”
Spring’s millinery is already dominated by these small leather, straw or silk “perchers” fixed forward near the face – right, or centred – and slightly bigger, pillbox and pat berets. They’re decorated – little artworks – with sculpted and stylised flowers, feathers, spiky pompoms and leggy, wired ornaments of light silk, petersham or grosgrain, raffia, sinamay or crinoline. Sometimes, the ornaments extend so far and aerodynamically away from the head they wiggle and shiver in the air as the woman walks. One marvellous, canteloupe-sized pom-pom of fingerling feathers in milliner Rebecca Share’s collection, for example, hovers like a planet, several centimetres off the wearer’s head. “Nothing shy or retiring about my millinery!” Share says, “I like dramatic, sculptural trims that are easily seen!”
Rebecca Share: “I LIKE DRAMATIC, SCULPTURAL TRIMS THAT ARE EASILY SEEN…”
Veteren milliner Serena Lindeman calls spring’s showier hats, with their extravagant antennae, “three ring circus hats” despite that their pillbox or lozenge bases are often quite small. “But, they should never be so (showy) the woman’s personality can’t shine through,” she says. It’s a rule of modern millinery that seems logical enough, but is not always applied: that a hat must suit a woman’s psyche and physical proportions as much as it does her frock and shoes. “It should not just look like the product of some milliner’s workroom,” says Lindeman.
Even the heavier straw and sinamay “big” hats with formed crowns and proper brims (less common this spring) and ornaments shooting in all directions, in millinery-speak, are best suited to women with “strong personalities”. “It’s up to the milliner to intuit that,” Lindeman says. “And also, to work those (illusory) tricks in; like the “inverted triangle” silhouette that creates a narrowing effect (down the body) – so the hat makes a woman look beautiful from every angle, even as she walks away.”
Serena Lindeman: “(A HAT SHOULD) MAKE A WOMAN LOOK BEAUTIFUL FROM EVERY ANGLE..”
The six milliners picked to feature here were among several to show ready-to-wear collections for hundreds of champagne-sipping racegoers at Melbourne Racing Club’s Couture Millinery event. It’s a regular, joyful prelude to the milliners’ brief and brutal “bespoke season” when their clients arrive with fresh frocks and boxed shoes and the next three months are spent bent over blocks and picky stitches, crafting the hats to match. Melbourne’s 125-odd commercial milliners create an average 100 bespoke hats each in the run up to Caulfield and Melbourne Cups. Some take a couple of hours to craft, others, more tricky, up to three days or more. And, though bespoke hats are still notoriously expensive – averaging $300 to $450, with a top-end from $500 to $700 – prices have actually dropped in recent years and, in real terms, milliners are often under-rewarded for their work.
Felicity Northeast: “A LOT OF MONOCHROME, AND GEOMETRIC SHAPES…”
“I’m doing very well,” says Felicity Northeast breezily, “But I’m glad I’m not living just on millinery!” Key among Northeast’s spring hats are those hooked into fashion’s current obsession with mono and duo-chrome palettes and geometric shapes: small, chic side-tilted lozenges, berets and pillboxes of stretched silks and parasisal straw. Softer, more whimsical designs (there are always soft, whimsical alternatives in most milliners’ collections, even the drama-loving Share’s) come in Japanese vintage silks stretched over small, perchable pieces with lovely, stylised flowers for ornament.
Northeast is typical of many milliners; she began as a hobbyist and works in a home studio. When commercial success finally blossoms, many find it difficult to curb creativity to fit reasonable production times and costs. Millinery is not renowned, in other words, as a lucrative career.
Luci Giblin, left, and mother Yvonne of Ward & Wylie “WE TRY TO STEER AWAY FROM WHAT EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING…”
“You can often not get back what you put in,” says milliner Luci Giblin who runs her Ward & Wylie label with her mother, Yvonne. One extraordinary hat in their collection proves her point, taking days to complete, beginning with the laborious snipping of hundreds of tiny, luminous thumbnail sized feathers off a peacock pelt. “Then the fluff’s got to be cut off each one, then they’re got to be put into order of size, then…” Many hours of handsewing later, and one visionary client will score a work of art for about $600, actually worth thousands more.
Louise McDonald “THE VISOR; EASY TO WEAR, SHARP AND CHIC…”
The clincher driving most milliners back to their hatblocks, spring after spring, is passion for their craft and the women who love and buy it. Louise Macdonald, for instance, a masterly craftswoman who makes a year-round living from her regular ranges for Hugo Boss, her eponymous ready-to-wear label and 100-odd bespoke commissions, is businesslike about her creativity, links her collections to current fashion, and ensures Nowness is always a priority. “I like to push the envelope,” she says. She’s invented a new kind of covered, stylised visor for example, and a number of jockey-like hats to defy spring’s trend to brimlessness; “These are sharp and chic, with a bit of sun protection,” she says, “And good for some; not every woman suits a small hat.” Macdonald also lays to rest many wage-earning women’s fear of forking out $300 to $600 for a hat they’re likely to wear only once. “That just doesn’t happen,” she says. “Very few of my clients wear it only once; they’ll wear it through the season, then throughout the year, then for several years, and they’ll lend it to their friends, or daughters, or whatever. It’s good!”
Click contacts
Louise Macdonald
Jill Humphries, Jill &Jack
Felicity Northeast
Rebecca Share
Luci and Yvonne Giblin, Ward & Wylie
Serena Lindeman
