OUR Asia CORRESPONDENT
milliner Elisabeth Koch
#6
Elisabeth Koch set up her eponymous label, Elisabeth Koch Millinery, in Beijing in 2007. As the first traditionally trained commercial milliner in China, her hats have braced the glossy covers of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan and Elle, to name a few, and have been shot by Mario Testino, Chen Man and Sebastian Kim. In 2020 Elisabeth moved back home to the Netherlands, where she keeps her finger on the beating pulse of the hat scene in Asia. In this regular column, read about her experience as a milliner in China and what’s hot in the region.
56 | the hat magazine #92
In the author’s Xingfucun studio in
Beijing, 2016
The Rise of the
Hat Making Workshop
in China Part 1
I have made hats together with over a thousand workshoppers, and I know this because I checked my balance sheets for all the sinamay bases I have bought to date, minus what I have in stock now. That’s over 180 hat makers per year during the time I lived in China and offered workshops.
The whole idea of hat making workshops isn’t my own. I spotted the idea on one of the few websites of a fellow milliner I could access from China – that of British hat maker Katherine Elizabeth. Thank you Katherine! It was 2013 and I had already been making and selling hats for six years. I mulled over the idea for a year before I took any action or started my research. The reason was because I had no idea if my Chinese clients would find this an interesting activity to undertake.
Handicrafts, DIY (do-it-yourself) and just crafting anything isn’t much of a thing in Beijing. While the Chinese have an incredibly rich history in (silk) embroidery, crocheting, carving, etc., it seemed that the level of affluent Chinese big city ladies who made up my clientele would rather buy something than make it. And that something had to be new. There was no market for second-hand products that I could find – later, vintage designer shops popped up, but not in 2013. As far as workshops were concerned, there was flower arranging, and that was a big one, more like overdone. And calligraphy painting. But how would hat making
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