HATS off to MARIE
A moment in the mirror wearing a hat she didn’t even buy led to a new later-life career in millinery for Marie Flanagan
In her late 50s, out shopping one day with her husband, Marie Flanagan’s eye was drawn to a large brown felt hat festooned with feathers. On a whim, she picked it up, placed it on her head and froze at her reflection in the mirror of the posh dress shop. “Visually, it was a wow – like something you might see on Downton Abbey. What I couldn’t believe was the way it made me feel – like I was a completely different person. It was such a powerful experience,” she recalls. After a long recovery from a back operation, Marie (now 68) hadn’t been feeling her best at the time and the frivolous headpiece had given her spirits a welcome boost. What she hadn’t expected it to do was lead her into a new career as a milliner when retirement was just around the corner. “At the time I was beginning to feel quite depressed and a bit isolated,” admits Marie, a former teacher and counsellor, who is married to Donald (64) and lives in Halifax, West Yorkshire. Throughout her life and while bringing up her daughters Molly (45) and Megan (41), she’d always worked. Although she came from an artistic family and studied fashion and textiles in London in the late Sixties, her career had revolved largely around helping people. “My first childhood ambition was to be a nurse,” she recalls. “I was always dressed up in a nurse’s outfit – nursing was a big thing in my family,” she recalls. After graduating though, she began her career by working in community education, teaching crafts to whole families, victims of domestic violence and ex-prisoners, as well as lecturing in embroidery one day a week at Leicester School of Art. “When I was 21, one of my lecturers told me I would bring art to people. I didn’t know what she meant at the time…” she adds. Her words were to prove prophetic. Marie went on to become a counsellor, working in the fields of family therapy and mental health and her last job was working for Mind as an advocate. “There was always a human side to my work,” she adds. But when service cutbacks and a ruptured disc led to her giving up that job in her late 50s, she turned to art – painting and doing embroidery at home. But she still wasn’t quite fulfilled. “I can’t just sit around and not do anything!” she adds. Marie’s life changed on the day, when out shopping with Donald in Harrogate, she tried on the hat, thinking she’d love one like that if her daughters got married. It proved to be her lightbulb moment – even without buying the hat, which came with a hefty £2,000 price tag. “When I looked in the mirror, I looked and felt like somebody else and realised I could be
somebody else,” she says. Soon she was enrolling on a three-year millinery course in Huddersfield – then one of only a handful in the country. For her 60th birthday, helped by Donald, she launched her new business in a converted butcher’s shop in Huddersfield. “When I should have been retiring I was opening a hat shop!” she says. Marie decorated it herself in the style of a chic French salon. In the back room she had a day bed so she could lie down between customers when her back was giving her pain. As the business took off, Marie couldn’t help feeling fate had a helping hand. By coincidence soon after launching, she stumbled across hat blocks for sale that had been used by the renowned milliner Philip Somerville to create hats for his royal and celebrity clients – including Princess Diana, the Queen mother and Kylie Minogue. “I had to have them!” she adds. But it is in her showroom that she always felt her new role was ‘meant to be’. She explains: “The women who come to me are often nervous about wearing a hat as it is for a big occasion. Often they’re mothers of the bride or they may have lost their hair through cancer. They want to look their best but they don’t know what suits them.” Remembering how she felt that lifechanging day when she looked in the mirror, and calling on her best counselling skills as well as her artistic eye, she is able to make them feel the way she did in that first brown hat. “I have done so many different things in my life but somehow this has pulled it all together.” Since launching her new career Marie, who now works from a studio in Halifax by appointment only, has discovered millinery is in her blood. A relative in Ireland has sent her a census form from 1901 when her greataunt was registered as a milliner. Marie’s daughter Molly has also followed in her footsteps. “I couldn’t stop what I am doing. It’s part of my life. I’ve always been in ‘a visual world’. I have to do this now. You don’t get a second chance.”