Jenny Beattie
‘Net Zero’
‘Net Zero is a top hat, trimmed with lots of widow’s veiling and a large flower. However, bar a sinamay foundation, wire and petersham, it’s made entirely of plastic. ‘Net Zero’ plays with ideas of traditional millinery but with ugly modern rubbish that is causing an environmental crisis. My inspiration are the materials themselves. I’m a collector of random things; materials are often the starting point for a hat design. What will it do? What won’t it do? Can I make it do it anyway? Plastic has very firm ideas of what it will and won’t do which was a huge challenge. The colours were dictated to me by the vegetable nets and the plastic sheeting I found on the street. (I did dye some garlic netting purple.) The end result is pretty extravagant and maybe a bit comic too?
Price: £600.
“I strongly believe that traditional skills and techniques (unchanged in millinery for many generations) can co-exist in a modern world. My ways of making are completely informed by the training I had using traditional felts and straws. But I am an obsessive collector of things… materials… rubbish, whatever it is that appeals to me. It might be the colour (the purple sheeting) or the texture (the vegetable nets) and I collect them, hoping I’ll be able to pull off a hat made from something surprising. I still use traditional, sewing skills to make striking and wearable headpieces and hats from eclectic funky materials. And, in this project, as in so many millinery projects, my main tool was heat. I used both a normal iron and a heat gun to manipulate the plastic. ”
Materials and Techniques
The sinamay base of the hat was blocked on an existing top hat, then covered in the fused plastic. For this top layer, I used a technique called ‘plastic fusing’ that I learned from @deartoday. Purple sheeting fused with bubble wrap on top gives a beautiful texture reminiscent of snakeskin. The larger veiling was hand cut from a piece of garden sheeting; I used a heatgun on it to give it more character, curling and warping in the heat. The smaller veiling was patchworked together from white nets that I dyed purple. The flower was assembled from vegetable nets and introduced to the heat source – both iron and heatgun. Of course, plastic behaves nothing like traditional materials so some liberty was taken in my method but where traditional skills worked, I used them.
Millinery Heritage
“I began making hats for my expat community when I lived in Bangkok, Thailand for a bit over a decade. At first I used my sewing skills and my sculpture degree to tell me how to do things but eventually I started arranging my holidays to the UK around millinery courses. In 2017 I came back to the UK to do the HNC Millinery course at Kensington and Chelsea. The reason I started taking courses was because the heritage of millinery has always felt important to me. I wanted to know how to do things properly, rather than cobbling a solution together with my maker’s intuition. I think it’s always better to know how to do things properly; both because the results will be better but also when you need to break a rule, you know why you’re doing it.”
“My great grandmother, down the maternal line, Jessie Everett, nee Green, was a milliner. I didn’t know until after my father died and I’d already started my millinery journey. At some point I’d like to do some family history research to find out more about her.”
About Jenny Beattie
My brand is Jenny Beattie Millinery which I started, optimistically, during the pandemic! I grew up surrounded by costumes and props made for the local theatre group by my parents but ignored these signs and went off to study Classics at Hull University. As a mature student I did a foundation course and Fine Art degree and although all my work was about the body, I NEVER put anything on the head! During twelve years living in Bangkok, Thailand, I started making hats for my expat community. These creative experiences and a fascination for surprising materials eventually came together at Kensington & Chelsea College’s HNC in Millinery and I was off. I draw upon this creative background to create unique, elegant looks for fashion, editorial, weddings and races. Highlights of the last few years are winning HATalk’s 2022 competition with my Haberdasher Hat and a recent hat in Vogue Adria.