Mad as a hatter, or is she on to something?
● Fedora, Trilby, Panama, Boater, Bucket, Flat Cap, Homburg, Porkpie, Newsboy, Cowboy, Top hat, Bowler, Boonie, Cloche, Fez, Cartwheel, Sombrero, Ivy, Breton, Turban, Derby, Campaign, Hamburg, Ascot.
There are as many hats as there are heads, and Crystal Birch is on a mission to ensure that we return our bare-headed pates to a behatted state as soon as possible.
Yes, the baseball cap may be ubiquitous on the heads of the youth, and Beyoncé is riding the cowboy hat revival into the bright dawn of a new day.
But as Crystal is quick to point out to me, cloth caps are manufactured like clothes, cut to a pattern and sewn together, whereas hats of every other stripe, including the cowboy hat revivals, are the net result of a wonderfully elaborate process that starts with a mould and ends with a trimming.
And Crystal is the only trained milliner to own one of the last factories, with machinery and moulds that are well over a century old, to still be making hats from scratch in South Africa.
I find her sitting at the Salvation Cafe at 44 Stanley, where we order a very quick sandwich and soup combo for a rapid fire lunch.
She is sporting what I think may be a flat cap in a fantastic tealish colour in the midst of an intense day of unpacking as she sets up her first Johannesburg stand-alone store a few doors down.
This shop may also have the distinction of being the first dedicated milliners to open in the city in well over 100 years.
Myriad boxes, moulds and stands are being unpacked for the opening at the weekend. Fantastical hats manifest like a magician’s trick — highly representative of her whimsical humour and her great style.
This is, after all, a person who created a sold-out “Disney funeral” extravaganza, each black hat topped with two bold Minnie Mouse ears. Because according to Crystal, people still buy a profusion of black hats for funerals and apparently there is also an appetite for ears.
Crystal tells me she always gets asked three questions: “How do I know what size my head is? How do I travel with my hat? Where can I buy your hats in Johannesburg? She is answering the third question now. Her factory, which also functions as a showroom, has been in Woodstock, Cape Town, for the past three years. Before that it was in Gardens for well over a century. How she came to own it is a story that reflects her grit, tenacity and absolute love for a craft and skill set that is frankly endangered in the current climate.
Most of the hats you buy in South Africa are manufactured overseas and trimmed locally. Crystal’s staff have a skill set that is unique. Many of them have been making hats for nigh on 50 years. She jokes that she needs to keep a mechanic on staff to repair the century-old machines.
“We don’t import hats, we are the only ones who make them 100% local. Harry Factor owned Parisian Milliners, I was in the factory for six years and the owner for three. But during lockdown we began to collaborate with the other two hat manufacturers to help and support each other, because we needed to and I am the smallest one, so they didn’t see me as a threat. So they shared their resources, which I am so grateful for.
“But then an Indian family found me at Decorex. They had a factory that closed almost 20 years ago here in Joburg, and they had stock in storage for 20 years, stuff they bought in the ‘80s and ‘70s. Suede, velour, hair felt, real Ecuadorean panamas, which we are making into the most amazing limited editions.
“We are smaller and more niche, we make smaller runs, and we’re the only ones that do a bespoke service, where we make the hat just for you, we produce for designers and we have a hat hospital service.”
I ask her what she would need to make manufacturing easier?
“Orders. I have a partnership which is great but I need the orders to carry on. I need support from Cida (The Community & Individual Development Association) to get new machines. We finally got one after three years of intense paperwork. I need the government to help. I need DTI to support me instead of giving me a mountain of paperwork, and it takes years before anything happens.
“I need retailers to order from us. We support 20 families and have a skill set that is priceless. It is handmade and it takes time but it is so worth it.”
Crystal grew up near an airfield in Limpopo. Her family were all pilots and many youthful memories involve the adults partying in the hangar.
She moved to Cape Town, via Joburg, and had a dancing gig on KTV when her parents divorced. She was a sporty child who did every extramural going, including debating which is a skill she still deftly deploys along with her high-octane energy.
She could be an excellent spokesperson for the manufacturing sector in a quest to simplify the bureaucracy that stands in the way of getting support and grants that the government ostensibly has available to help businesses and manufacturers.
She studied fashion after school and lived with a family whose mother’s macular degeneration resulted in close contact with the visually impaired community. This experience profoundly affected her.
“I learnt that, sadly, in South Africa most people become blind due to violence and trauma, and I became overwhelmingly grateful for seeing all the amazing things and being a visual person as a designer, but also much more conscious of texture and sound.
“It really made me more sensitive and grateful for all our senses, and very in tune, design-wise, visually. I am planning to work with the basket weavers in Woodstock in our next CSI project.”
She was inspired by a talk given by Albertus Swanepoel, the New York-based South African milliner who won a Council of American Designers and Vogue award, who said it was important to specialise early in the fashion industry and to define your passion.
For Crystal, it was hats from a very young age. She worked with Jackie Burger, the Elle magazine editor, and then moved to London to study millinery while supporting herself by working several jobs.
She interned with Piers Atkinson, who was her “spirit animal” and after returning to South Africa found that what was a side hustle to her day job in advertising was progressively taking over her energy and her life. Now hats consume her and she would like them to play an outsize role in your life too.
“When the sun shines, do people walk around with umbrellas? No, they wear hats. I have many clients with skin conditions, vitiligo, alopecia, skin cancer, skin conscious.
“Then there are people who express themselves in fashion, at funerals, wearing them to church, in the safari industry. But mostly I would like to convince people that you can look amazing in the sun, in a contemporary, stylish, fashionable way. You can wear something really beautiful and elevated, and protect yourself from the harsh African sun.”