Louise Macdonald
Louise started working as a milliner in 1990 and over the years, she has managed to build up an impressive career. Her hats stand out at the
racecourse, but can also be spotted in well-known fashion stores, films and TV productions. She has developed a very recognisable individual style.
Many of the headpieces she has created in recent times are made without the use of hat blocks. This is a technique that she teaches to others. “I like manipulating fabric. In the past few years you could see many new milliners making the same-shaped hats, sourcing their blocks from the same supplier. My clients like to have something unique, that’s why I started developing freestyle techniques.” Louise still likes to design hats but having done this full time for 27 years, she felt it was time for a change.
Travelling teacher “Next year I intend to pull back on my made-to-measure work and to start focusing more on teaching. I will keep making hats for my online collection but I want to have more time for two things that I love: travelling and teaching, a perfect combination. There are a lot of places in Australia I intend to visit offering workshops, but I also want to go to the US and to Europe.” Educating others is something Louise has always done throughout her working career, be it through offering workshops and courses in her studio or by providing information to colleagues online. “My partner works in IT. When the Internet arrived, he told me I would need a website to sell my hats. I thought that
Headpieces from Louise Macdonald’s Spring 2017 Collection
was a silly idea at the time, as thinking nobody was ever going to buy a hat on a website! Fortunately he ignored my scepticism and registered some relevant domain names for me anyway! He put in a lot of work in setting up these sites. So I began using
www.millinery.com.au to promote my own business, and had www.
millinery.info set up as an educational and information site about millinery. I started doing interviews with milliners, which my husband would put online on the site, together with other useful information such as a suppliers’ page and a dictionary. As time moved along, other informative websites appeared, such as Racing Fashion, which published a lot of photos and articles about racing events. Then came social media. Milliners had their own platforms which made it harder for me to get people to interview, but every year we kept posting information and
photos about the Melbourne Cup and the Dubai World Cup.” Six years ago, Louise was joined by Lauren Ritchie, initially starting with work experience during her studies. Lauren brought fresh enthusiasm working for Louise a few days a week. Louise: “It’s been wonderful working with Lauren the past few years, our skill sets complement each other perfectly! Two years ago Lauren began to see the potential for
www.millinery.info to grow as an educational site. It continues to cover Spring Carnival Millinery and has grown to include a podcast series to keep you company while stitching in your workroom! Maybe next year we can combine my millinery travels with
Millinery.info’s online plans - we’ll see.”
For more information, see
www.millinery.com.au and
www.millinery.info
november 2017 | 61
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