COLUMN
OUR Asia CORRESPONDENT
milliner Elisabeth Koch
Hat Shop Memories in Asia
Since I left Beijing, and since the pandemic, lots of hat shops I initially
wanted to write about for this article have since closed, sadly. But with a little research and looking at contacts, you can find more than you may have bargained for. Here is just a small selection of shops dotted around Asia, selling headwear from baseball caps to vintage classics and souvenirs.
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 is the editor-in-chief of Hatlines Magazine and keeps her fingers on the beating pulse of the hat scene in Asia. This is the final instalment of her column from a series of eight. Follow more of her hat adventures on Instagram @elisabethkochmillinery or check out
www.ElisabethKoch.co
The Man In The Hat Hong Kong
I was briefly in contact with Richard Avery (pictured) about five years ago, when he was setting up The Man In The Hat and trying to organise a hat exhibition in Hong Kong. He doesn’t make hats, so far, but he has spent many hours restoring fedoras and bowlers. Mostly though, he collects, buys and sells men’s hats in their “cute little shop” (as he himself calls it). And occasionally he is invited to make speeches and presentations about hat history and his love of hats. The shop is going well, despite the pandemic and the street protests of 2019, so revenues and customer visits are steadily increasing. With this level of hat appreciation, next time I’m in Hong Kong, I’m definitely going to pay him a visit. Richard says: “I’ve always loved the look of
hats, since first watching The Lone Ranger on TV as a boy in England and dreaming of my own cowboy hat. I occasionally wore a trilby at university but hats were completely out
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of fashion at that time. Much later, while living in Belgium, my childhood dream was realised when I acquired a black Resistol cowboy hat and my first Indiana Jones fedora. Not long after, we relocated to Hong Kong. “In Asia, there are low ceilings and the hot sun. If you are tall, bald and clumsy, you either wear a hat every day or you will have problems. I learned this lesson the hard way with many head injuries, so for personal safety, I had to wear hats. While searching for new hats, I quickly became dissatisfied with what I could find in department stores and fashion
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