Titfer The Top!

He's worked with some of the world's best milliners and topped off the designs of the catwalks' biggest stars, and now Noel Stewart launches his Angel Heart Goes to Paris collection for Autumn/Winter, inspired by cult movie Angel Heart. A mixture of 1930s deep south America, Parisian couture and English eccentricity, this collection displays refined elegance with a quirky twist. Noel Stewart's formal line is available from Selfridges).

         
       
         
     
       
         
       

Fashion Film and Fiction' At the Wapping Project
by Georgina Razack

"My particular favourites were an Edwardian hat by milliner Noel Stewart..."


       
       

Out of the dressing-up box
by Rebecca Rose

"Less showy pieces include......Noel Stewart's bridal garland of squishy flowers and gauzy veil .. "

         
     

The Independent, Life & Culture Style
 14 July 2005 
Talking Heads                                                                                                                                

He cuts up his uncle’s curtains and works in his mum’s flat. But milliner Noel Stewart is no amateur. Stephanie King meets him

Noel Stewart’s workplace – actually his mum’s flat and his home – is hive of hat-making activity. Work is literally spilling out of the door, with huge hatboxes stacked up in the hall as well as hoisted precariously, ceiling high, via a pulley system in the stairwell. The kitchen is festooned with hats, mood boards and garment bags containing outfits in need of matching hats for private clients. His actual workspace is just too calamitous for him even to open the door and show me inside. All testament to this young milliner’s ascent, and subsequent workload for both his eponymous line an London design names.

Stewart’s talent was recognised from the off. His first collection (autumn/winter 2003) was picked up, and continues to be bought, by Barneys I New York. Selfridges has since become his major UK stockist, and his fold of private customers has tripled to include budding politicians, Ascot-goers, lawyers, mothers of the bride, and performance artists. Plus his collaborative work with ready-to-wear designers is flourishing. Having created show pieces for Roland Mouret’s catwalk since spring/summer 2004, this autumn Stewart is producing a range of hats with Mouret to be sold as part of Roland Mouret’s actual collection, regardless of the runway.

It’s a big commercial step for a milliner to be aligned to a designer in such a manner,, and Stewart is tickled pink about it. “It’s great that the Roland hats will be a stocked and sold collection. I was like, ’Oh, my god!’ when he suggested it”, he says. “When I started millinery – before college – I was working for Dai Rees [a milliner], and we all talked about whom we’d most like to work for and even then it was Roland.”

It’s impressive, the number of achievement boxes that Stewart, aged 30, has been able to tick, having graduated just three years ago from the Royal college of Art, but he was hardly green to millinery when he entered the RCA. Southampton born and London-raised, his foray into hat-making, looking back, was fated. “I was always surrounded by has as a child because my father collected them – silly things like fezzes, Viking helmets, and more practical fishing hats,” Stewart explains. And his hoarding mother, who kept all of his school stuff, recently unearthed a rather obscure Brazil nut box-and-raffia creation, which turned out to be a hat made by Stewart, aged five. It wasn’t until Stewart was doing a BA in the decorative arts a City & Guilds of London Art School, however, that his passion for millinery became apparent.

“I held this ‘headfest’ party for my 21st, inspired by a film called Ridicule,” says Stewart. “Everyone was to wear headgear, and a college friend asked me to them a hat. It was all mesh and wire and tissue paper, and someone proclaimed, ‘Noel – the new Philip Treacy, and I thought ‘Oh, my god, there’s this whole other world going on, and it makes so much more sense to me’. I was like an awakening, in a way.”

The remainder of his studies were devoted to millinery. ad although his lecturers complained that hat-making didn’t fit within the decorative-arts bracket, Stewart persuaded the college otherwise and walked off triumphant with the decorative-arts prize. Millinery night-classes followed, before he bagged work experience with his now mentor Stephen Jones. It was Jones who recommended that he study at the RCA. “I had to run to catch up on the fashion and design side, but I picked things up quickly,” says Stewart.

In his three years as a professional milliner, aside from his personal line, Stewart has worked hats for the Queen’s milliner Philip Somerville; done a stage at Christian Dior Haute Couture; and created catwalk headwear for Roland Mouret, Peter Jensen, Camilla Staerk and Roksanda Illincic. “I love working with other designers because each process is different, and I push myself creatively,” says Stewart. “But what gives me the greatest pleasure,” he adds, “is seeing someone enjoying wearing a hat, rather than it being paraded down a catwalk or being worn because an occasion demands it.” That’s why Stewart is ecstatic to have his hats in shops via Mouret. And this autumn, the London boutique B Store has bought his hats for Illincic, which means even more of his work in the public domain.

True, Selfridges does stock Stewart’s collection, but it’s his formal, wedding-style headwear, because, according to Stewart, “in Britain, people still equate hat wearing with ceremonial occasions.” He does, however, add his edge to big brimmed numbers, with floral details concocted from hand blown acetate and brass rods as stamens

Materials and finishes are key to Stewart’s work, and often they result from personal finds, such as his great uncle’s moiré curtains, cut up and refashioned into a hat; or a turban comprising of three of his father’s sporting ties; or what appears as jaunty brooch on the brim of a trilby being, I am told a chicken bone, boiled, bleached and covered in snakeskin.

What Noel Stewart is keen to point out, however, that his fashion hats aren’t “scary”. “I’m just not a scary kind of person. In fact, that’s how the collaboration with Roland Mouret came about, because we had a similar understanding that it was unnecessary for hats to be overpowering,” he explains. “And effortlessness is far more difficult to effect than fantastic drama.”
         
     
         
       
         
     
     

 
         
       

Mad Hatters Tea Party

Noel Stewart is one of the most innovative new milliners to come out of London in a long time, providing a fresh perspective on how we dress the head, as Kathryn Brudenell-Bruce discovered.

The English over the centuries have had an enduring love affair with hats. Fashion marches on though and hats are now viewed more as an accessory than an essential part of an outfit. Noel Stewart, a highly creative young milliner, believes hats are now enjoying something of a renaissance.

“I think people are a lot less scared of wearing hats than when I first started. I remember thinking when I left college “oh my God, what have I done?” I had got myself into this industry and was completely passionate about t but people weren’t buying hats”, he says.

“But now I find a lot more people are using them and loving them. You see more hats out on the street and in shoots and on the catwalk. I think women are more comfortable with hats, say as opposed to 10 years ago.”

Noel certainly never planned to be a hat designer.

“It wasn’t really a conscious decision if the truth be told, it was a happy accident”, he confesses.

Noel had enrolled on a BA in decorative arts and for his final degree show produced a collection of hats in various different materials. This revolutionary act almost got him thrown off the course with Noel protesting that his collection was decorative arts and could they define this concept for him if they disagreed. His other inspiration for switching career was a hat and wig party he gave for his 21st birthday. Friends, noting his talent for dressing the head suggested he should become a hat designer.

After his BA course Noel decided to pursue hat designing and had a brief stint working with designers Dai Rees and Stephen Jones. With Dai I was there for nine months. I started off doing two days a week and I made myself indispensable so they gave me a job”, explains Noel.

His next move was to enrol on a two-year course at the Royal College of Art to do his Masters, specialising in hat design. At his final year collection he experienced the sort of lucky break that most young designers can only dream of, when his collection was picked up by the Creative Director of Barney’s New York. He still works with them to this day.

“They buy my casual range and I work with them developing fabrics especially for them, so it is an exclusive range”.

Noel has also collaborated with other fashion designers and feels fortunate to have worked alongside one of his all-time favourites.

“Roland Mouret was the only person I ever really wanted to work with, so I have achieved one of my aims in life working with him”, say Noel.

The first collection he designed for Roland was in Autumn/Winter 2003. The range was sold in Browns and Selfridges and the creative union between the two designers continues.

“I have just done Autumn/Winter 2005-6 and I ended up making about 30 hats which is a lot”, he explains “I created a whole new hat range for them”.

When it comes to contemporary milliners, Noel is divided as to whom he admires.

“It is hard to say one person as everyone has strengths for different reasons. I really admire Philip Treacy’s strength of technique and drive. He has transformed making hats. He is extraordinary from a technical point of view. I also love Stephen Jones for actual hats that people want to wear”.

In addition to working with other designers, Noel set up his own label that was launched in autumn 2003.

“I have the casual range, the couture range and the ready-to-wear and then for summer I design a whole other little collection for hats, it is not a structured thing I just show it to private clients”, he explains.

In addition to the women’s range he launched a capsule menswear range just over a year ago

“To be honest it is not something I have pushed massively. I know where my strengths lie and until I am 100% happy with that I am not going to focus too much on the men”.

Noel is stocked in Barney’s and Selfridges and has recently had his collection picked up by a boutique in Reykjavik, which is a coincidence as Noel confesses to longing to design a hat for zany Icelandic singer, Bjork.

“I just love her crazy style”, he says.

If Noel could be said to have a signature look it is a variation on the classic cloche and trilby hat.

“I have two blocks for my ready-to-wear and one of them is very angular, it is a trilby but quite complex as things have to be a logical progression. I also work with the cloche which I have extended and made sharper but not so sharp that it is really aggressive”.

Noel considers the couture collection to be an essential element of his work as a designer.

“My couture is about pure creativity and is much more sculptural and cerebral. Last season I did four and it tends to be quite small”, he explains.

One glorious creation he made for his culture range is a citrus green and pimento affair called Georgette Swirl. This wide brimmed hat has one of the edges cut off, lending the hat a slightly asymmetric look. A veritable labour of love this hat had to be made upside down including all the stitching and then dipped in gelatine to stiffen and set the design. Another flight of fantasy for the couture range is his silk and magnolia branch with brass stamens and moss chiffon strands where billows of soft, giant petals frame the face, making this creation the ultimate hat statement.

As regards inspiration for this summer’s collection Noel examined extremes.

“I wanted to do something that was contrast, making angles soft and then hard. Playing with those sorts of contrast, so it is quite conceptual to that extent. I took big, wide brims and worked quite a bit with organza that is soft with a hard edge. I didn’t want to do anything too obvious”. 

The casual range features plenty of linen that is fashioned into bucket and trilby shapes, these classic styles are then given a twist and a tweak with a cream linen bucket trilby being enlivened with a stunning coral piping. Picking up on the hot shades that are around, the ready-to wear collection has a flame-red coloured plate hat with a black organza trim with a Spanish feel to it and then there is a vibrant blue ocean box hat with a lobster and black flower. Dramatic, wide brimmed hats also feature prominently and are lifted above the conventional with profusions of tulle and organza artfully arranged on the crown of the head.

Designs for Autumn/Winter 2005 are firmly underway and Noel took his collections in a decadent direction using a fair amount of fur.

“I have used a golden mink and a sapphire mink. I was doing what I call trapper hats, David Crocket meets Bond Street. I really love working with fur”, he says.

As regards the future, Noel has his eye trained on one of the world’s great fashion capitals.

“I would love to do a show in Paris and I would really like to work with a French fashion house. It is just a whole different attitude”.

Whether he is based in Paris or London, one thing is for sure, we will be seeing a whole lot more of the edgy, young hat designer in the seasons to come.
         
     
         
       
         
     
       
         
     
         
     
         
     
         
       
         
     
       
         
   
         
     
         
       

Noel was asked by photographer Jim Lee and Fashion Director Nikki Brodie to create some peices for a shoot for 34 magazine in Istanbul. They wanted something simple and iconic with a modern feel but still couture based. Noel came up with these tulle discs which have lame threaded through them to create a very subtle geometric shimmer. Noel and Jim went on to shoot the look For this spring summer collection.

   

     
   
         
     
         
     

PVC White Bow from Spring Summer 2004 appears in Elle for Springtime.
         
     

Cocktail hat in Sunday Express magazine as part of a flirty fifties fashion spreads.
         
     

Graduating in 2002 from the Royal College of Art with an MA in millinery, alongside working for Stephen Jones and Dai Rees, Stewart is showing all the traits of a good modern milliner. Respectful of those who have gone before him, he is also frustrated by the traditions that lead to the conventional “ One of the things that frustrates me is when I tell people what I do, they’ll say to me ‘Oh, I love hats but I can’t wear them’. Everybody can wear hats. Its just that there is not enough variation out there for enough styles to suit everyone”. For Stewart its about offering something different than what he calls, “the obvious for hats – bows, feathers and flowers.”

With his collection split into Couture and Ready-To-Wear, the epitome of Stewart’s attitudes is a felt formalised version of the beret that is produced each season in the Ready-To-Wear collection. In pinks, greys, and yellows, the shape of the hat comes from an old block bought from a retiring milliner. A row of embroidered spiders can be seen running across or there is a skull and crossbones version. For spring/summer 2004, this perfect shape has also been produced in straw.

   With the Ready-To-Wear collections, Stewart has an approach to designing where he works with an idea or feeling in mind. This is then translated into people; “It varies from hat to hat. I think would that person wear this hat? I use partly friends, partly people I see on the streets and partly people I respect. My Couture though is much more sculptural, about saying stuff rather than wearing stuff”. The couture side of the business is more of a love affair for Stewart with identity being a by-product for him and the design being much more about creative expression. He would like to push this creativity, “In millinery, there is a lot of un-tapped talent. We can create amazing images, not just fashion but art.” Hats as art are where his heart lies, but his training and his work with thise who should be seen as his contempories will ensure that wearable is where his head is. Preferably in a hat, of course.
 
         
     

THE FIRST NOEL

NOEL STEWART is well qualified to make a seriously stylish assault on London's millinery scene. The 28-year-old hat maker has learnt his trade working with Dai Rees, Roland Mouret, Stephen Jones and John Galliano at Christian Dior. And now he's going it alone. Stewart unveiled his second, spring/summer 2004, collection by way of a film in Portobello's Electric cinema. His subject, Eloise (a 17-year-old Select model), was seen galavanting around London in various of his creations which themselves made the audience literally sigh with desire. "I want to create something that people can wear," he says. "A hat doesn't have to be a huge statement or upstage everybody else in the room - I want to make them more accessible and less aggressive than they have become."

 

That means gloriously Hepburn-esque wide-brimmed black ones, girlish bows that sit high on the head or huge, beehive-style creations for the more fashion forthright. And Noel, who first thought about millinery as a career when he was asked by a friend to make a hat for his own 'headdress fest' 21st birthday party, intends to change the world's attitude to hats forever. "It drives me up the wall when people say, 'I love hats, but I just can't wear them,'" he says. "So I've set myself a project."
 
         
       

Noel is the first and only milliner to work with Roland Mouret. So far Noel has created felt helmet for Autumn/Winter 2004, crin head pieces and corsages for Spring/Summer 04 and is now working on hats for Mouret's debut CRUISE collection, being launched in June.

Noel's felt pieces for Mouret were featured in the shoots below and bought by Browns and Selfridges and Aquaint in the United States.

    
         
       
     
         
RUSSIAN VOGUE   RUSSIAN VOGUE    
         
       
   
         
SLEAZE NATION I-D THE FACE
         
     

I think we have seen quite enough of celebrities using hats to cover a bad hair-day or a dodgy dye-job. Madonna, Sarah Jessica Parker, Christina Aguilera and Gwyneth Paltrow are all fans of the tweed flat cap, while J.Lo, Cameron Diaz, Shania Twain, Halle Berry and Gwen Stefani have all fallen under the spell of the baker boy hat.

Come on girls! Summer’s here. It’s time to be frivolous and extravagant. If you’re going to wear a hat, at least choose something the boy’s can’t wear.

Back in January, a dimly lit strip club in Paris, called the Pink Paradise – a haunt of Mick Jagger and Robbie Williams – was the setting for the launch of celebrity milliner Philip Treacy’s new summer collection
The audacious nature of the venue was far exceeded by the extraordinary designs, which were not so much hats as wearable works of art. Naomi Campbell wore a photograph of her own face alongside Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can; other designs featured the faces of Marilyn Monroe, Gwyneth Paltrow, Fred Astaire dancing with a gin and tonic, and David Beckham, complete with a £15,000 De Beers diamond ear-stud.

Once again, Treacy demonstrated his uncanny knack for turning millinery on its head and reinforced his belief in the late Christian Dior’s assertion that “ without hats, we would have no civilisation”

   Today, we may not have such a role model as Diana, Princess of Wales to champion the cause of the hat, but nothing it seems, can keep them out of the limelight. In this month’s Harper’s Bazaar, Penelope Cruz models hats from the summer couture collections of Emanuel Ungaro, Chanel and Gaultier paris.
All of John Galliano’s catwalk shows, ready-to-wear and couture, for Dior and for his own label, would not be complete without the ingenious talents of former Blitz boy Stephen Jones.

May 17th sees the launch of the British Hat Guild’s second Week of Hats, in aid of Macmillan Cancer Relief. Highlights include The Hat Magazine’s four week spectacular, to be opened by wacky young milliner Cozmo Jenks. The week culminates with a Wear a Hat to Work day on May 23. All of which provides the perfect curtain-raiser to Royal Ascot, which runs from June17 to 21.

If Treacy, Jones and Jenks don’t appeal how about Zara Phillips’s favourite hatmaker, Tara O’Callagham? New milliners hoping to get ahead in the business include Suzanne Bettley, daughter of Luton hat-maker Peter Bettley, who has launched her own diffusion range and the young Royal College of Art graduate Noel Stewart, who created the hats for Roland Mouret’s show at London fashion Week in February. Hats off to them all.
 
         
     

Five years ago, when a friend looked at the first hat Noel Stewart ever made, and told him he was shaping up to be the next Philip Treacy, Noel responded: ‘“ Who’s Philip Treacy?” I didn’t know anything about fashion then, or anything about hats.’

Now, aged 26, with a couple of apprenticeships (with Dai Rees and Stephen Jones) and a millinery degree from the Royal College of Art under his belt, Stewart’s rather better informed. And he appreciates the comparison with Treacy – which is a fair one. The hippest and edgiest of the new milliners, Stewart happily subverts traditional notions of hat making forma seventh-floor studio in the RCA.

‘I like to wirk in white leather or patent and wire, with chunky accessory stitching so that my hats feel as desirable as handbags and shoes,’ he explains.
Stewart’s time at the RCA studio is limited. Now that he has finishe dhis degree, he’s contemplating life as a fully fledged milliner. He has a couple of possible studios lined up and an outlet for his most commercial flat caps (a range favoured by Danii Minogue). ‘I feel I can do it now,’ he says. ‘I have the context and the structure to make it work.’

   Stewart’s muse is a film producer and countess called Gaida Dobrzenska. He has to check he’s spelt her name correctly, ‘because she’s changes it slightly, really recently.’

They met four years ago in a squat restaurant in Vauxhall, and Syewart says, simply, that she was ‘the most incredible person I had ever met. She’d just got off a plane after starring in a German soap opera. She funded her way through St. Martins by appearing twice a month.’ A year later, Stewart asked Dobrzenska to produce a film documenting one of his shows. ‘We joke about her being my muse, but it works for me,’ says Stewart fondly.

Stewart’s long-term ambition is to introduce hat wearing to an entirely new generation. ‘I was waiting for a friend in Topshop recently, and it was torturous watching the young girls trying on hats, and doing it wrong over and over again’ he says. ‘Our generation just doesn’t have the hat-wearing experience, and I think that’s a shame. Hats can be a statement of creativity, and a shield. It would be nice if I could make people understand that.’