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OUR Asia CORRESPONDENT


milliner Elisabeth Koch Workshop in Beijing, 2017


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, Koch moved back home to The Netherlands where she is the editor-in-chief of Hatlines Magazine and keeps her fingers 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.


Workshop in Shanghai, 2017 Hat Making Workshop


The Rise of the in China


Part 2


In Part 1, I talked about how I got the idea for hat workshops from other milliners but wasn’t sure how they’d go down in China, where city people aren’t really into DIY. But after a successful summer of trial workshops in Atlanta, USA, in 2014, I was confident enough to roll them out in my Beijing studio. The handmade hats gained traction among the ex-pat community first, followed by my Chinese clientele.


I mentioned in part 1 that, largely, Chinese would rather buy (new) than make something. One workshop in my studio was filled with Chinese ladies. We all got started and everyone was already busy when the last workshopper arrived late. She was beautifully dressed. She walked around the tables, coat still on, clutching her Gucci handbag, looking at what everyone was doing: sewing, fumbling with twisted bias strips, rummaging through the box of faux flowers. No


emotion. Then she looked at all my hats on display on the floating shelves on the wall. She came to me with a ready hat she had pulled from one of the mannequin heads and said (pointing to the others): “I don’t want to do this – may I take this hat instead?” The value of that particular fascinator happened to be roughly the same price as the workshop, so I said that was fine, put it in a box, and off she went. That was amusing;


may 2022 | 45


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