BL-24 - Flipbook - Page 69
ENTREPRENEURS
shows: we host pre-Ascot parties in
her beautiful Sloane Street 昀氀agship
shop, and I make bespoke hats for
some of her high-pro昀椀le clientele.
My work with Emilia was
serendipitous. My hat studio in
Shropshire is set within a courtyard
of cottages: one of these was let by a
New Zealand businesswoman called
Angela. When something went wrong
with her internet, I offered her my
studio to make a Zoom call.
It turned out the call was with her
daughter, Emilia. “Mummy, where on
earth are you?” she asked. “Why are
you surrounded by beautiful hats, and
who made them?”
I also make bespoke hats for clients
from the worlds of racing, politics,
showbusiness, high 昀椀nance, for British
royalty, and for more mothers-of-thebride than you could 昀椀t into a beer
tent at Cheltenham. And I make hats
for period dramas: actress Charlotte
Radford’s upcoming World War I
昀椀lm Can You Hear Me?, partly 昀椀lmed
at my Elizabethan home of Upton
Cressett, will feature my Edwardian
hats.
listed my business as their top Royal
Ascot milliner, I had to pinch myself.
So, what are the highs and lows of my
15-year journey? My mother, Vivien
Greenock, is a well-known interior
decorator, and my early life was
spent being surrounded by beautiful
wallpaper and textile samples, and I
quickly developed an eye for beautiful
fabrics.
But, although I trained for a while at
Colefax & Fowler in Mayfair, and
later at George Spencer in Chelsea,
I soon realised that I had a creative
obsession with designing hats, not
decorating homes or designing
dresses. So I enrolled at the London
College of Fashion and sought out a
millinery internship.
I only knew of one milliner, Gina
Foster: her father, Tim Foster, had
painted a portrait of our family in
Norfolk. I went to see her at her shop
off Kensington High Street only to be
told that I’d missed the deadline for
the millinery course at the Chelsea
College of Arts and I’d have to wait a
year. A month later, she rang to say her
intern had left and could I start as soon
as possible?
I opened my own boutique in 2011,
and my 昀椀rst studio was a back
storage room in my mother’s of昀椀ce. I
began making hats for friends, many
of whom were going to dozens of
weddings a year, and my 昀椀rst big
break was being chosen as an of昀椀cial
milliner for Royal Ascot as part of
the Royal Ascot Millinery Collective.
I suddenly found myself in the same
company as Philip Treacy.
I think a key secret to my success is
that I don’t really regard my work as
a normal job. It’s a creative passion.
When, in May 2019, Harper’s Bazaar
After the Telegraph article on the
service included Princess Olga
wearing my black pillbox hat, I
suddenly found myself in demand
as a milliner for big funerals. I went
on to create a chic black pillbox for
Samantha Cameron to wear at the state
funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. I also
created a pillbox for Akshata Murty,
wife of prime minister Rishi Sunak,
to wear at the Trooping of the Colour.
Another hat that got media coverage
was the 1950s-inspired extravagant
“Strawberries and Cream” picnic hat
that I created for singer Katherine
Jenkins to wear on top of a doubledecker bus at the Platinum Jubilee
Pageant.
In June 2018, I got an unusual call for
a memorial service hat from Princess
Olga Romanoff, president of the
Romanoff Family Association, who
lives in a 13th century manor house in
Kent. “My daughter Alexandra and I
are heading to St Petersburg to attend
the 100th anniversary memorial of the
murder of the last Tsar, my great-uncle
Nicholas II, and his Tsarina. Could I
come and see you to discuss a suitable
black hat?”
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ISSUE 24
Liz Hurley wearing Laura’s Pink Truf昀氀e
One of my favourite commissions
was being asked by the owner of
Charbonnel et Walker chocolates to
create a line of special “My Fair Lady”
hats – inspired by Cecil Beaton’s
昀椀lm costumes – for their Royal Ascot
Week shop window. The extravagant
hats all came with their own boxes of
chocolates made from silk and golden
thread: my husband, after a glass of
wine, helped himself to a violet cream,
thinking it was real.
But things do not always go according
to plan. Once, a friend volunteered
to drive one of my summer hat
collections back to Shropshire from
London after they had featured in a
Selfridge’s fashion show. I then got a
distraught call from her saying her car
had been broken into, and the entire
collection stolen.
