When Priscilla Royer joined the Parisian couture hat maker Maison Michel in 2015, she brought with her a respect for the traditional artisanal processes along with some new ideas to give them a little shake up along the way...There’s a little wooden iron in the hatmaking room at the millinery atelier of Maison Michel in the Aubervilliers district of north-east Paris, that is probably older than the maison itself. Certainly, it’s been used to smooth and press the felt and straw used by generations of hat makers, at least as far back as 1936 when the millinery house was set up by Auguste Michel. The hand-carved iron looks as though it belongs in a museum. You can feel the decades of hard graft in the smoothness of the wood, the shape of the curves. ‘It’s been with the house for a long time,’ said creative director, Priscilla Royer, 36, who was giving me a tour of the atelier in November last year, ahead of the opening of a new shop on London’s Conduit Street. ‘They’ve been using it from hat maker to hat maker.’

Elodie, one of the small team of three hat makers, is busy shaping finely woven straw over a wooden block, carefully protecting it with a cloth so the heavy red hot iron (a metal one she has taken from the oven, using a hook to take it out of the intense heat) doesn’t damage the material. She says the wooden iron was at the workshop when she arrived eight years ago. You can’t find tools like these any more. You could carve a new one, but it would take years to get it so smooth.

While Maison Michel’s atelier had focused on making hats for couture house clients, such as Chanel, Balmain and Nina Ricci, and presentations over the years, in 2006 it launched a collection under its own name. The first Maison Michel boutique opened on rue Cambon in 2013, where Gabrielle Chanel – who started out as a milliner – opened her hat shop just under a century earlier in 1910. When Priscilla Royer joined the atelier in 2015, she inherited not just a collection of wellworn tools and an archive of more than 4,000 hat blocks, but a small and dedicated team of extraordinary artisans skilled both in hat making – the hard physical work of shaping felt and straw into 3D forms – and millinery, the softer, more decorative work of drapes, bows, ribbons and embellishment. Maison Michel’s exquisitely made but formal hats needed an update for a new generation and Royer was tasked with the job of making sure the specialist makers had something relevant to work on beyond show pieces. The couture millinery house had been gathered into the protective arms of Chanel in 1997 as part of its bid to protect the skills of some of the finest craftsmanship, including the embroidery houses Lesage and Montex; the feather and flower wizards of Lemarié; and pleating specialists Lognon, that might otherwise have not survived. Chanel didn’t want to merely preserve those crafts but to give them new life, and create employment for the artisans and, in the case of Maison Michel, a new generation of hat devotees.

‘When I arrived, my main concern was that the hat was something you placed on a table like an object of design and you don’t want to touch it; you don’t want to ruin it,’ Royer told me. ‘That was a problem for me. I was not thinking that way.’

She showed me around the studio, explaining the process, introducing me to the various members of her team, proudly presenting the archive of wooden blocks, each one precisely carved from linden wood, traditionally used because it is so hard and durable. She was dressed in a pair of jeans, and a black jumper with sleeves that hooked over her thumbs. Her hair was perfectly messy and her clear blue eyes devoid of make-up. At that point, she had already designed the collection – one of four each year – for summer 2020 including the Ursula raffia hat with its exaggerated brim and casually raw edges, blissfully oblivious of pandemics and how the world was to change over the next few months ahead.

We talked about how she had maintained the craftsmanship, quality and luxury materials of Maison Michel, but twisted the shapes and styles so that they found a new audience. Her approach is surprisingly pragmatic, acknowledging that a hat has a functional role in our wardrobes. ‘You have two different ways to approach it, either the weather forecast – you have to be protected from the sun, the cold, the rain,so we have waterproof felt and for the cold we have cashmere beanies – and the other side would be style. Nowadays we don’t have the same social codes. You don’t have the banker hat, the postman cap, it’s more about what message you want to give to people and it’s more a question of style and silhouette. It’s both whether you want to be utilitarian and with a bit of style – that’s what we try to mix together.’

The golden age when a hat was an essential part of any outfit started to die in the late Sixties and early Seventies. In the sixties, the superstar hairdressers like Vidal Sassoon were busy crafting hair styles that were such a statement, that covering them would have been sartorial suicide (not to mention a total waste of a very expensive hairdressing bill). And in the Seventies, you’d burnt your bra, so something so formal as headwear was the last thing on your shopping list. The two great hat wearers of recent times were the Italian fashion arbiter Anna Piaggi and the eccentric Isabella Blow, who said she wore hats (whether an Erik Halley bejewelled lobster or a Philip Treacy galleon in full sail) to stop people getting too close. Blow’s take on social distancing was, like much of her wardrobe, ahead of its time. Royer however, represents a new generation for whom the hat is more of an everyday item, a reflection of more casual times when sportswear, pyjamas even, are acceptable clothing choices. ‘I’ve always had hats, but as an accessory like a bag or a piece of jewellery. When I arrived [at Maison Michel] I discovered that wasn’t the case in people’s minds. So I started to work with many different faces and many hats and open it up to supple hats, caps made from leather and with different techniques.’
It was important, she said, to ‘desacraliser’ the idea of the hat, to make it more popular and less precious. She worked on different shapes, introduced baseball caps in felt, made shapes that were meant to be supple, hard and vice versa. ‘I wanted to blur the line and break everything that could be in people’s minds.’ The fact that Pharrell Williams became the poster boy for Maison Michel (he’s rarely seen without one, whether the neat felt-brimmed Henrietta Bondage, or Royer’s signature Jamie cap with a pair of cat’s ears protruding from the top), is proof she achieved her goal. 

Pharrell’s head is a long way from the fusty world fine millinery once inhabited. Royer introduces me to Blanche, who started at the company more than 30 years ago. When she arrived it was in an old town house at 65 rue Sainte-Anne in the centre of Paris. ‘It was like an apartment, quite tiny. The milliners were in the living room, the owner, the big boss, was in a cupboard. The hat makers were in a corridor, the ribbons and stocks were by the toilet.’ It was a relief, she says, to move to the current space (and the better working conditions) which also houses the archive of 4,000 hat blocks which are still used as the basis of each season’s collections. ‘What’s important is the quality of the work that remains,’ says Royer.

Blanche is the keeper of the ancient Weismann machine that is unique to Maison Michel. It’s more than 100 years old and few remain in use, but Blanche deftly demonstrates how she takes strands of straw and uses the machine to sew it into a spiral that gets bigger and bigger to form the material for a hat. This then goes to the hat-making room to be shaped and steamed on a block. Blanche works on the more delicate side of the millinery workshop, primping a bow on a cocktail hat, draping a silk scarf into an effortless looking turban, applying studs or working with the most delicate tulle veils in a way that makes it look untouched by human hands. 
As well as their own collections, they make special orders, and are on call for Chanel’s annual Métiers d’Art collections each December, held to showcase the craftsmanship of the ateliers. ‘They are very patient because there are so many steps,’ says Royer.

Back in the hat-making room, Eloise is switching from one hat to another. She works quickly. ‘It’s a combination of steam and humidity, with a bit of coaxing to make sure the shape stays according to the wooden block,’ explains Priscilla. Eloise sprays the felt and puts it into what Priscilla describes as the ‘hat hammam’ to steam in 200 degrees for 30 seconds. ‘It’s taking a bit of a beauty treatment and then it will get stretched to work on a proper shape.’ The felt is made from rabbit hair, though historically they would have used mink and beaver too. They have also introduced wool felt for anyone who doesn’t want to wear rabbit. ‘We have to think about new solutions. More and more people are vegan and we have to address the climate right away.’ She has been investigating other materials including mushroom fibre and apple leather, but to ensure the quality and the durability – and a material that can withstand the heat and steam – there is still work to be done.

There are endless combinations of crowns and brims, and under Royer, Maison Michel has developed a signature style to the shape of its hats that gives them a cool edge, while still being steeped in the traditional ways of hat making. ‘A hat will be different depending on who’s working on it because they all have their own tools, their own hand feeling and way of working,’ says Royer. Eloise bends a bamboo rod around the crown and taps nails into it to hold the felt in place, before putting it back in the oven at 320 degrees for half an hour to dry.

Eloise trained in theatre and cinema set design but switched to millinery. ‘Hat making was traditionally done by men and millinery was more for women,’ says Royer. One of the first shapes she worked on when she joined the company was the new block with cat ears. It was a challenge to make it work, process-wise, but now she tells me, people collect them each season.
As well as felt, Eloise works in straw, woven in Ecuador where every design is different depending on who made it. ‘The material is really artisanal and the way of working it is artisanal too. We have partners in Ecuador, who work with weavers in villages so it’s very organised and structured, so for instance we are able to trace who wove this one and we can work with this type of village because they weave with very thin straw.’ They have also used the rarest of superfine artisanal straw from Montecristi, the village famous for the impossibly fine weave of its hats, made from straw fibres from the leaves of the paja toquilla plant, which is unique to the Ecuadorian coastal region and added to the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List in December 2012. ‘It is an insanely beautiful material and there are only one to two people in the world that can make it,’ says Royer.

She also worked with the hat makers to develop a rollable felt hat that bounces back into shape once you’ve taken it out of your bag. ‘I use the whole atelier as a creative laboratory and nothing is impossible, but in the end you have to try everything. That’s the approach I had when I arrived. I just have to wait an hour or two then I see it! That way I stay close to the product and I stay close to what can be done.’

While Royer seems so at home in this creative environment, channelling her innately cool aesthetic into luxury baseball caps, trilbys, bucket hats and sophisticated scrunchies with ears (hair accessories are now part of the MM offering), she grew up a world away from fashion and haute couture. ‘My dad is a farmer,’ she says. ‘I grew up in the countryside and moved to the nearest town, Reims, at the age of seven or eight.’ Her days were spent with her three sisters, running feral on the farm. ‘We played outside a lot, we were very much into mud and would play in the big mountains of my dad’s wheat. 
In the winter it was very cold, and you would have a lot of time on your hands.’ She would make Brazilian bracelets for her dad and whenever one would break he would ask her for a new one. She spent her time knitting and crocheting. She would make clothes for her dolls from old socks. There wasn’t much in the way of fashion where she grew up, so she got a sewing machine and made what she wanted.

She would dress up her sister ‘with old things from my grandmother, so it was a constant game and I don’t think it has changed a lot – I still have the feeling I am playing, it’s just bigger and better quality.’

She moved to Paris to study fashion at the Studio Berçot, and then moved to London in 2007 to work at Vivienne Westwood. She then launched a womenswear label based on the idea of using traditional techniques in a contemporary way, called Pièce d’Anarchive with her sister Deborah and a friend, Virginie Muys, in 2012, winning the prestigious ANDAM award for young designers in 2012. After they closed the label, she was approached to bring her slightly anarchic approach to tradition to Maison Michel. Deborah is now the global chief creative officer of the fragrance house Le Labo in New York. One of her sisters became a chef and the eldest works on the farm with her father.

You get the impression that while Royer gets lost in her world at Maison Michel, she would also be quite happy back on the farm. ‘I need to be alone with my things, even if it’s a piece of thread, a safety pin and two pencils. On my own and far from the noise.’ She lives on the other side of Paris ‘by the forest’ and commutes to work by bike. ‘I get to recharge my batteries every day,’ she says. ‘It’s super important. I get most of my ideas like that, by being on my own and surrounded by nature. And I get topped up in the city and by observing people, it’s a combination of the two. I need either as many people as possible, or nothing. I’m very radical that way.’ michel-paris.com
WORDS TAMSIN BLANCHARD | PHOTOGRAPH THOMAS CHÉNÉ