Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Style myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.It\u2019s a misty November morning, and in the eaves of Street Farm Workshops \u2013 a restored 17th-century farmhouse on the Highgrove Estate in Gloucestershire \u2013 six millinery students are hard at work. Barnaby Horn, a recent Royal College of Art graduate, is contemplating the crown of an unusually tall and verdant hat he\u2019s making from sinamay, a material derived from the dried stalks of the abaca tree, inspired by the topiary in Highgrove gardens. \u201cI find hats a really useful anchor for more complicated stories,\u201d he says of the design, in\u00a0which he tried \u201cto capture a feeling of matter being changed\u201d as it does when one walks through the estate\u2019s different gardens. \u201cIf a fashion collection is the\u00a0novel, I like to see the hat as a poem or a haiku. It\u2019s saying an almost impossible amount in a very small thing.\u201dAs far as student experiences go, learning and lodging in the grounds of Highgrove, the country residence of King Charles III, has got to be up there with the best. Now\u00a0in the third of an eight-month programme, the students have been hand-picked by Chanel, The King\u2019s Foundation and the Chanel-owned Parisian hat-maker Maison Michel at Le19M to learn the art of millinery to atelier level as\u00a0part of a new M\u00e9tiers d\u2019Art Fellowship. It joins an existing Chanel M\u00e9tiers d\u2019Art Fellowship for\u00a0embroidery students that was launched in 2023.The millinery students, who have varied education and experience in fashion, textiles and costume design, will also spend time at Maison Michel in Paris. As of 2021,\u00a0the milliner has been housed at Le19M, a four-storey, Rudy Ricciotti-designed building conceived by Chanel to bring the 12 specialist maisons acquired by the brand under one roof. Highgrove is another piece of the puzzle, reinforcing Chanel\u2019s commitment to safeguarding craft.\u00a0\u201cWe are very honoured that The King\u2019s Foundation invited us to create this wonderful international initiative\u00a0in Highgrove,\u201d says Bruno Pavlovsky, president of the Chanel fashion group and Le19M. \u201cIt highlights Chanel\u2019s strong\u00a0commitment to finding and training the next generation of artisans, and passing on the knowledge and\u00a0skills of these unique expertises.\u201dFor these young milliners, skills will include blocking, a technique that involves shaping a\u00a0hat\u2019s material over a wooden block (Maison Michel has an impressive archive of the most bizarre shapes, all hand-carved); felt shaping; dyeing; feather- and flower-making; and sewn straw skills. It\u2019s an offering that is rare, if not impossible, to find at other educational institutions in the UK \u2013 saddening for a nation known for its love of hats and which once had a thriving millinery industry. (In the early 1900s, according to the Heritage Crafts Association, there were reportedly 11,000 milliners in London alone.)\u00a0\u201cMillinery techniques are not being taught to a high level,\u201d says Daniel McAuliffe, education director at The King\u2019s Foundation. While short courses, BTECs and millinery specialisms within fashion design BA degrees are available, most students who want to take their skills further have to rely on private tuition with milliners or internships in studios. \u201cBut they can\u2019t gain the same set of skills that we are teaching here,\u201d adds McAuliffe. The\u00a0course includes accommodation, subsistence, materials and tools; classes are taught by couture milliners such as Sarah Cant, a Stephen Jones alumna.Not all the candidates had made hats before, but each of the chosen six demonstrated a passion to master the craft. \u201cWhat was important for Maison Michel was meeting a young generation who wanted to go in this direction,\u201d says Priscilla Royer, Maison Michel\u2019s artistic director, who was on the interview panel. \u201cWe took the six that were specifically the best for us to maintain our hat-making in the future. Those who had not necessarily the technical ability but the desire to work in this industry.\u201dStudent Niall White, 24, currently working on a three\u2011tier hat (his millinery interest was sparked by the towering designs worn at Paris\u2019s Folies Berg\u00e8re), impressed the panel with his enthusiasm and dedication, having simultaneously undertaken an internship with milliner Holly Young in Cornwall alongside his textile design degree at Falmouth University. Jessica Turley, 22, a first-class honours textile design graduate from Edinburgh College of Art, had never made a hat before but is energised by traditional craft. \u201cWhen I read that they were open to taking on someone so\u00a0new to hat\u2011making and completely train them up, I was so excited,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s a once in a lifetime opportunity. To come out of this as a maker is amazing.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0When I visit in November, the students have been getting to grips with sewn straw \u2013 the technique of making a straw hat by sewing together lengths of plaited straw in a spiral from button to brim. It\u2019s a skill for which Maison Michel is famous and which was once widely practised in Britain. Milliner Lucy Barlow is leading the class; Veronica Main, author of the definitive book on straw-plaiting, recently taught a workshop.\u00a0For Emily Hurst, 22, this is a dream come true. A\u00a0graduate of costume design and construction at Nottingham Trent University, she had already taught herself to braid straw using Main\u2019s book. The cowboy-ish hat she\u2019s currently working on contains 34m of straw that she completed in three days. \u201cStraw-plaiting is just something I really have found love for and it\u2019s on the [Heritage Crafts\u2019] red list, meaning it\u2019s a critically endangered craft,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m very passionate about bringing back the techniques that we\u2019re about to lose and seeing how they can be brought into this modern setting.\u201d\u201cWe didn\u2019t imagine anyone like Emily would exist in this country,\u201d says McAuliffe. \u201cShe\u2019s kind of a prodigy.\u201d Royer adds: \u201cEmily was not only braiding her own straw, she was even thinking about how to grow her own straw. It\u2019s a very, very mature approach for her age and it\u2019s completely in the world of luxury.\u201d \u00a0As the students pick up their hats to be photographed with them in the Highgrove gardens they take the future\u00a0of millinery with them. One of them will go on to an internship at Maison Michel in Paris or a London hat-maker, but by the end of the course, they will all be among the country\u2019s most highly trained young milliners,\u00a0with a set of time-honoured skills that they can in turn pass on, benefiting the fashion industry for generations to come. In these hands, hat-making could\u00a0reach new heights.\u00a0kings-foundation.org<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Style myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.It\u2019s a misty November morning, and in the eaves of Street Farm Workshops \u2013 a restored 17th-century farmhouse on the Highgrove Estate in Gloucestershire \u2013 six millinery<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":151193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-151192","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151192"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":151194,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151192\/revisions\/151194"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/151193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}