Out & About June 2017

TOP HATS

Former St Bart’s pupil and top couture milliner Jane Corbett, is celebrating her 20th anniversary with a new online collection. She talks to ANGELA KNIGHT about her designs and her venture into sculpture J ane Corbett is Berkshire’s leading milliner, best known for designing many hats for HRH The Duchess of Cambridge and her mother Carole not been for seeing a tiny advert in the back of Crafts magazine which said ‘couture millinery London’.

“I applied and when I walked into this lady’s workshop it was literally a lightbulb moment when I saw all the wooden blocks you use to shape hats, and all the materials. I suddenly realised I had an absolute passion for it even though I had never even done it.” Jane never looked back, she was hooked from that moment. There is certainly a lot involved in making a bespoke hat; if the colour of the hat is to match a particular dress the straw has to be hand-dyed, then steamed and shaped over wooden blocks. It is stiffened, then taken off the wooden block where it is cut, wired and edged. Then a trim is added for decoration. It is a really hands-on, time-consuming process to create a handmade creation which is why Jane’s hats are unique and not mass- produced. Jane trained for 18 months before moving on to working part-time at a couple of other milliners and then working full-time with John Boyd, an ‘old guard milliner’ in Knightsbridge where she learnt her craft like an old-fashioned apprentice and was very well trained.

Middleton, including the elegant pale blue hat that Mrs Middleton wore with her outfit for the Royal Wedding. It’s now the season for racing, weddings and garden parties – a chance for stylish ladies to stand out from the crowd and complete their outfits with some elegant headwear for such formal and glamorous events. Being a high-profile milliner, creating bespoke hats for celebrities and royalty, it is astonishing to discover that Jane doesn’t actually own one of her designs. She has only two hats herself: one is a woolly hat for taking her dog for a walk and the other is a vintage 1940s black hat which she says is “simply beautiful”. Jane was born in Worcestershire and moved with her family to Newbury at the age of 12. She says her formative years were spent in Newbury, where she went to St Bart’s, which she really enjoyed. After school, she studied Fine Art at Newcastle and loved Northumberland so much she says: “I got stuck up north for years and years because it was so beautiful.” She might never have been a milliner had it

Her designs combine these traditional techniques with a very personal creative style. Jane found she missed Northumberland, so she went back and tried to sell couture hats in a rural area, which wasn’t a key location. “I also had a child so I made the decision to relocate nearer to my parents who were still in Berkshire, so they could see their grandchild

This season I have concentrated on some classic couture millinery touches, such as delicate handmade flowers and pleated ribbon details

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