Chanel’s royal society of hatmakers

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It’s a misty November morning, and in the eaves of Street Farm Workshops – a restored 17th-century farmhouse on the Highgrove Estate in Gloucestershire – six millinery students are hard at work. Barnaby Horn, a recent Royal College of Art graduate, is contemplating the crown of an unusually tall and verdant hat he’s making from sinamay, a material derived from the dried stalks of the abaca tree, inspired by the topiary in Highgrove gardens. “I find hats a really useful anchor for more complicated stories,” he says of the design, in which he tried “to capture a feeling of matter being changed” as it does when one walks through the estate’s different gardens. “If a fashion collection is the novel, I like to see the hat as a poem or a haiku. It’s saying an almost impossible amount in a very small thing.”

As far as student experiences go, learning and lodging in the grounds of Highgrove, the country residence of King Charles III, has got to be up there with the best. Now in the third of an eight-month programme, the students have been hand-picked by Chanel, The King’s Foundation and the Chanel-owned Parisian hat-maker Maison Michel at Le19M to learn the art of millinery to atelier level as part of a new Métiers d’Art Fellowship. It joins an existing Chanel Métiers d’Art Fellowship for embroidery students that was launched in 2023.

The millinery students, who have varied education and experience in fashion, textiles and costume design, will also spend time at Maison Michel in Paris. As of 2021, the milliner has been housed at Le19M, a four-storey, Rudy Ricciotti-designed building conceived by Chanel to bring the 12 specialist maisons acquired by the brand under one roof. Highgrove is another piece of the puzzle, reinforcing Chanel’s commitment to safeguarding craft. “We are very honoured that The King’s Foundation invited us to create this wonderful international initiative in Highgrove,” says Bruno Pavlovsky, president of the Chanel fashion group and Le19M. “It highlights Chanel’s strong commitment to finding and training the next generation of artisans, and passing on the knowledge and skills of these unique expertises.”

For these young milliners, skills will include blocking, a technique that involves shaping a hat’s material over a wooden block (Maison Michel has an impressive archive of the most bizarre shapes, all hand-carved); felt shaping; dyeing; feather- and flower-making; and sewn straw skills. It’s an offering that is rare, if not impossible, to find at other educational institutions in the UK – saddening for a nation known for its love of hats and which once had a thriving millinery industry. (In the early 1900s, according to the Heritage Crafts Association, there were reportedly 11,000 milliners in London alone.) 

“Millinery techniques are not being taught to a high level,” says Daniel McAuliffe, education director at The King’s Foundation. While short courses, BTECs and millinery specialisms within fashion design BA degrees are available, most students who want to take their skills further have to rely on private tuition with milliners or internships in studios. “But they can’t gain the same set of skills that we are teaching here,” adds McAuliffe. The course includes accommodation, subsistence, materials and tools; classes are taught by couture milliners such as Sarah Cant, a Stephen Jones alumna.

Not all the candidates had made hats before, but each of the chosen six demonstrated a passion to master the craft. “What was important for Maison Michel was meeting a young generation who wanted to go in this direction,” says Priscilla Royer, Maison Michel’s artistic director, who was on the interview panel. “We took the six that were specifically the best for us to maintain our hat-making in the future. Those who had not necessarily the technical ability but the desire to work in this industry.”

Student Niall White, 24, currently working on a three‑tier hat (his millinery interest was sparked by the towering designs worn at Paris’s Folies Bergère), impressed the panel with his enthusiasm and dedication, having simultaneously undertaken an internship with milliner Holly Young in Cornwall alongside his textile design degree at Falmouth University. Jessica Turley, 22, a first-class honours textile design graduate from Edinburgh College of Art, had never made a hat before but is energised by traditional craft. “When I read that they were open to taking on someone so new to hat‑making and completely train them up, I was so excited,” she says. “It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. To come out of this as a maker is amazing.”   

When I visit in November, the students have been getting to grips with sewn straw – the technique of making a straw hat by sewing together lengths of plaited straw in a spiral from button to brim. It’s a skill for which Maison Michel is famous and which was once widely practised in Britain. Milliner Lucy Barlow is leading the class; Veronica Main, author of the definitive book on straw-plaiting, recently taught a workshop. 

For Emily Hurst, 22, this is a dream come true. A graduate of costume design and construction at Nottingham Trent University, she had already taught herself to braid straw using Main’s book. The cowboy-ish hat she’s currently working on contains 34m of straw that she completed in three days. “Straw-plaiting is just something I really have found love for and it’s on the [Heritage Crafts’] red list, meaning it’s a critically endangered craft,” she says. “I’m very passionate about bringing back the techniques that we’re about to lose and seeing how they can be brought into this modern setting.”

“We didn’t imagine anyone like Emily would exist in this country,” says McAuliffe. “She’s kind of a prodigy.” Royer adds: “Emily was not only braiding her own straw, she was even thinking about how to grow her own straw. It’s a very, very mature approach for her age and it’s completely in the world of luxury.”  

As the students pick up their hats to be photographed with them in the Highgrove gardens they take the future of millinery with them. One of them will go on to an internship at Maison Michel in Paris or a London hat-maker, but by the end of the course, they will all be among the country’s most highly trained young milliners, with a set of time-honoured skills that they can in turn pass on, benefiting the fashion industry for generations to come. In these hands, hat-making could reach new heights. 

kings-foundation.org