Madeline Thornalley of Hurtence explains why the most audacious, absurd hats provoke the greatest emotions
Hats are pure fantasy. You can do whatever you want when designing a hat. Disregard bodies and their damn shapes and measurements. Bulging, being difficult, never how you want them to look. Trying to illusion up a wasp waist, or shoulder and chest architecture for Canary Wharf top dogs. None of that matters. But hats – they don’t even have to fit the circumference of the head (fascinators!). Madeline Thornalley is the designer behind Hurtence – she makes hats, mad ones – and as she tells me: “there is for sure the freedom of No Wrong Answers in millinery. Everything is expected to be made up. Which I love, and I enjoy nothing more than figuring out a new way to make a structure, or to express a character, or to morph something I love into a hat, madness!” Maybe it’s because of the ostentatious, unshackled fantasy of the hat that it has been gradually shunned from contemporary everyday wear. Hats are a beacon that can demand attention from beyond several streets. The decibels of your appearance are ratcheted up to the max when wearing a hat. Rarely are they worn how they ought to be anymore – as something that finishes an outfit. Hats put the cherry on top of the knickerbocker glory.
People are shy about headwear – relegated to protection from the elements or falling debris, or special event accessories (weddings, Royal Ascot). Hats are adored by eccentrics. When you wear a hat people notice, and people will make sure you know they notice. They mock, or they take the hat from atop your head and wear it themselves (why?). A minor celebrity once grabbed my hat from my head and ran away with it at a house party – I’ve never seen them or my hat again. People respond to hats, they provoke emotions. Society is often rude to the hat wearer. But headwear is a powerful statement. You have to have gumption to wear a hat (honestly!). Perennial hat adorer Isabella Blow affirms this. It is because of people like Blow that hat wearing can seem so absurd and scary (English aristocracy have a habit of creating this feeling – there is nothing scarier than someone that can get away with anything), when in fact hats (just like Blow) can be absurd but charming, daring, decadent.
“I always think hats are so emotive because they are one of the closest things to your face, other than jewellery or make-up, etc. So when you see your reflection it’s right there and has a big impact on your feeling for the moment and moment extended. I don’t know, it feels like a personal area to be decorating. Like immediately in your eye line. And everyone else’s eye line. A mad hat gets the right people to talk to you and the wrong ones to leave you the F alone,” Thornalley says. Hurtence headwear is surreal – it is pheasant feathers curved to create the shape of a pair of scissors fixed to an Alice band. It is oilskin shaped into a severe-silly Wintour-like bob. Each hat has its own persona, its own little world within it. “I think they all wind up embodying their own character that seeps into your brain waves,” she adds. “Wish I could say how or why this happens but it is almost out of my control – the hats tell me what to do, honestly. It’s the best when people come over to try on different hats and have that feeling of the different character versions on themselves and they often change depending on the person who wears them.” A brim pulled down over the face has a single eyehole cut through it – a peek-a-boo eyeball becomes part of the accessory – and the hat melts into the wearer, becomes part of their face. Peeping Tom? Crime-solving Sherlock disguise? A hat changes the proportions of the face, the way that it is positioned is integral. A certain tilt can be plastic surgery without the pain. One fascinator headpiece, the Strange Quiff is a “temporary hair style for a gloomy night.” When the London air is sopping wet, wearing a hat can be the only option for gaining some control over your appearance. Look fabulous, and avoid a hair-do disaster.
One of the most influential of modern milliners, Philip Treacy, has said “there’s nothing more English than a hat.” In 1960’s England, hair-dos took over from hat-wearing in a rebuke of societal constrictions that aligned with the newly liberated times. Since then, the hat has gradually moved from being a symbol of conformity to a symbol of individualistic rebellion. (It wasn’t long ago that wearing a baseball cap underneath a hood was a stylistic choice potent enough to create tabloid-led classist witch-hunts against disadvantaged youth). But what do the English love more than to simultaneously uphold and pervert their own heritage? A hat can achieve such a playfulness that other accessories, somehow, cannot. The ridiculousness of a hat is unlimited. The connotations that can be expressed unending. You can be mad as a hatter, you can be a bad hat. “One hat in particular that has followed me around since childhood is in the book Madeline and the Bad Hat by Ludwig Bemelmans,” Thornalley says. “I love all the Madeline books — this one is extra good because it’s about the next door neighbour boy who is a bad hat (AKA bad egg) and the book is not only beautiful to look at but I do love the idea of calling someone a bad hat.” Hurtence is playful. Hurtence makes hats for bad hats.
If there is nothing more English than a hat, and an Englishman’s home is his castle, it seems fitting that Thornalley has recently become senior stylist at the new interiors magazine, Ton. And, in what Thornalley calls an “obvious segue”, she has recently begun to make lampshades: “hats for lamps, duh!” Ton is “pretty much an alternative take on the much established stuffy interiors world, by shining a light on undercurrent makers, styles, objects.” The magazine was created by Jermaine Gallacher, Thornalley’s close friend, and the two have always shared overlapping tastes. “I think there is a connection between interior design and fashion that is at its simplest aesthetic and at its best decorating a room as an extension of how you decorate yourself. Why wouldn’t my attitude about clothes extend and bleed onto the room I’m in?”
There were no childhood millinery dreams for Thornalley. “I wound up making them by complete fluke, I’ve never had professional training or went to fashion school… I’ve finally started buying old hat books and looking more into fashion in general which is something I never really did because I was just going with whatever I wanted… Now I feel I have my own thing going on I can look at more direct influences and not feel like it’s cheating.” Hurtence seems imbedded in a long history of millinery, of creating a persona through clothing, of disguise behind a mask of lovely frills, of bodily furnishings. Pieces can feel like modern re-imaginings of court costume accessories – in their pomp, in their ridiculous-seriousness. These hats speak vividly, and precisely, in just such a way. You wear the hat, and a lineage of some kind (of many tawdry nights?) is communicated. A cohort of entrancing and disturbing characters. Hats to create atmosphere.
All millinery pictured courtesy of Hurtence