Kim Fletcher - Milliner

Kim Fletcher - Milliner Kim Fletcher MillinerPosted October 13, 2011, by Elizabeth Fenech We can make some wonderful patterns for women in Australia because we know that there are clients here who will buy them. Australian women are lots of fun and very adventurous with their fashion. What does a milliner do? Milliners design and make hats. They take headwear from concept to completion. What is a fascinator and what is a hatinator? Fascinators originated in a time when women didnt have many showers and baths because water welches scarce. They used to put a piece of veiling across their hair to disguise the fact that their hair was greasy and dirty. The more herunterkommen version of a fascinator now is a kind of hair band featuring a couple of feathers or small flowers. A hatinator is a term that someone in a marketing department made up this year theres no such thing historically Whats happened over the past two years is fascinators have grown up. Theyve become bigger, so theyre not fascinators any more, but theyre not quite a hat. I guess someones tried to find a term that describes this new in-between style. A hatinator has a small cocktail shape with a large trimming on it. How did you get started in the industry? By mistake I used to work in administration doing payroll for a trucking company. But my husband always had horses and hes always been a punter so I always went to the races. My daughter was born in 1990 and I went back to work soon after. Like a lot of women I struggled to find myself. When you try to make time for everything, work and looking after a child, you disappear to a certain extent and I felt that I had nothing of my own. Just by chance, I saw an ad for a millinery course. The class was one night a week for six months. I thought, the worst thing that could happen was Id end up with an odd hat I started the course in 1993 and I was hooked. That six-month course was extended to 12 months. After that I started my own little market stal l in the city on Sundays. I got a really good grounding dealing with people and looking at styles. It was hard yakka though Two years after that that I got a studio to start my millinery business. I now have a shopfront and Ive been here for nine years. Where do you draw inspirations for designs from? I get most of my inspiration from the actual material. The fabrics tend to set the direction of where Im going with design. You have to take into consideration that we dont make the fashion we follow the clothing. We look at spring clothing designs and what styles are coming through. This year, there are lots of frills and ruffles, dresses are huge and its all very light so we havent made lots of heavily structured hats because they just dont work with those types of garments. Does making hats involve any trial and error or test runs? If its around April, sure But when its this close to the Carnival, we cant afford to do test runs The hats we make now must be ones we know how to create technically because we havent got time to muck around. When we come back from the Dubai World Cup in April, we sit down and brainstorm ideas for spring, because, by that time, Ive had a look at the collections of the designers I work with. Their collections give me an idea of whats coming through in terms of colour and style, and we go from there. Whats involved in Fashions on the Field? Fashions on the Field was originally held to try to get women to the racecourse. The annual fashion competition, held at Flemington, is now arguably more popular than the races themselves. Contestants are selected from each state to compete in the competition and the winner is awarded with prizes and publicity. Lots of countries overseas have seen the kind of reception the races get in Melbourne and theyre trying to replicate this popularity. Theyre using the fashion element to do that. Does your workload increase in the lead-up to the Spring Carnival? Because most of what we do is made-to-measure, it is very laborious and there is obviously a rush around the Spring Carnival. It can mean working to very tight deadlines. Whats your favourite material to work with? Is there any material you wouldnt work with? This season, my favourite is a material called jinsin. Its a woven fabric where straw is intertwined with silk and you can make some really great sculptural shapes with it, which is a bit different to what weve done