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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
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
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.
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
TOP
HATS