NEWS
Participating milliners at the exhibition
Different’ at Melbourne Fashion Week
Materials: Wire, raffia, twine, brown paper The lyrics to the song ‘Feeling Good’, written by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse, inspired this piece: “Birds flying high, you know how I feel… It’s a new dawn. It’s a new day. It’s a new life for me. And I’m feeling good.” Phillip says: “Letting go is easy yet the hardest thing to do. Two years on we should know what we don’t want or need. It’s a balloon, let it go.”
‘Boldly
Presented by Millinery Australia, ‘Boldly Different’ was an exhibition that brought together sixteen of Melbourne’s most talented milliners to let their imaginations run wild. The event took place as part of Melbourne Fashion Week 2021 in November and featured couture millinery as wearable art in response to the theme. Anything was in scope as long as it could be displayed on a mannequin head in the gallery space.
The inspiration for this piece was late 19th-century Korea. Elites during this period wore a traditional cylindrical hat known as a ‘gat’ to represent their social status. The creators of these hats were admired artisans, each having mastered a complex series of techniques. The ‘Empress’ is a homage to those artisans and their willingness to grapple with complexity in design, and the macrame pigtails are an attempt to expand on the design blueprint of the Korean artisans. The
‘Empress’,
much like the artisans of the past, is Georgia’s attempt to advance the art form.
Hosted at No Vacancy Gallery in Melbourne’s CBD, and continuing through a virtual exhibition on the organisation’s website, ‘Boldly Different’ showcased the broad variety of millinery techniques and materials used, each piece united by high quality workmanship and creative individual design.
More information
www.millineryaustralia.org
Material: Sinamay Straw fabric used by milliners is often hand-woven by weavers in China or the Philippines. As a tribute to these workers, Louise has ‘woven’ a contemporary hat employing patterns and techniques often seen in ribbon cockade work popular in the 1920s. A juxtaposed colour palette, bold with pastels, warm with cool is the result of utilising leftover scraps of straw and recycled materials from previous Melbourne Fashion Week exhibition pieces. Louise’s studio is located above the construction of the Metro Tunnel Town Hall station in Swanston Street. Its acoustic shed is decorated with a colourful mural by Emma Coulter, which gave more inspiration in the making process.
10 | the hat magazine #92
Photos by Richard Shaw Photography ‘Letting go…’ by Phillip Rhodes
‘Empress’ by Georgia Skelton
‘Off the Rails’ by Louise Macdonald
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