TheT Queen’s milliner’s guide to gettingge etting Ascot right
Marie O’Regan shares her memories of designing headgear for Her Majesty with Claudia Joseph
When the Queen opens Royal Ascot this week, milliner Marie O’Regan will be taking a keen interest. “I will definitely be watching the opening procession,” she says. “I’m always glad to see what the Queen is doing.” No wonder, really, given that the 92-year-old has designed hundreds of hats for the sovereign, including the red number that she wore when the Royal Yacht Britannia was decommissioned. “I went to Buckingham Palace many times and to Balmoral to do fittings,” she recalls. “[Her Majesty] was always very friendly to me.”
As for the attire at the races, O’Regan says “Ascot is very similar to a royal wedding” in that “members of the Royal family will always check with the Palace to ensure their hats won’t upset the Queen. Personally,” she adds. “I think that the hat is as important as the outfit. It’s always nice to have something eye-catching.”
It’s a fine balance to strike, however – even for a monarch. “I remember one day I was trying a hat on her and I didn’t think the colour was quite right. She said: ‘Maybe we can put some veiling on?’ ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Oh no Your Majesty. We can’t do that. We will have to make a new one.’ Then I realised she was standing behind me saying: ‘Oh. No, no, no Your Majesty. We can’t do that.’ She was imitating my accent apparently.” Indeed most of O’Regan’s memories of the Queen see her wicked sense of humour and skilful mimicry loom large.
O’Regan, who is eight months older than the Queen, has maintained a low profile since taking up the role towards the end of the Nineties. “Hat making is something very important to me,” she explains. “It’s not just pushing a needle in. It’s an art form.”
Now, her extraordinary journey from the back streets of Paris to Buckingham Palace has been told in a documentary, The Millinery Lesson, which may hit our screens next year.
Producer Mike Southon, a former BBC Arena filmmaker, said: “Marie is one of the undiscovered gems of the millinery world. She has worked for Dior, designed for the Queen, inspired some of our most famous designers and trained a whole generation of milliners, yet she is barely known outside the industry. I hope that she will now get the recognition she deserves.”
Born in Turkey in 1925, O’Regan was brought up in France after her family fled the country in the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide. Her father Krikor and older brother Harutyun had moved to Paris in 1927, and she followed a year later with her mother Varbara and older sister, Aurora.
It was only when they arrived in the French capital they discovered that Krikor had died of tuberculosis, and Varbara ended up having to do menial jobs to feed her two young daughters.
O’Regan had her first millinery lesson at school, going home and blocking one of her mother’s old hats over a saucepan. “I made a little brim and my mother thought it was fantastic,” she recalls.
And it was while she was at school that she first encountered the future Queen. One of a handful of children chosen to greet King George VI when he visited Paris in 1938 with his wife and daughters, “they were holding dolls in their arms and we were waving flags saying: ‘ Vive le roi. Vive la reine’.”
In 1939, at the age of 14, O’Regan left school to train as a milliner. After the war she worked for some of the most prestigious milliners in France, including Orianne, Legroux Soeurs and Maud Roser before going on to design at Gilbert Orcel, and moving to London in 1959 to work for Otto Lucas.
She met her husband, actor Terence O’Regan, in a north London pub. “He was very handsome,” she smiled. The couple married and had two children: Michael, now 56, and Stephen, 49, who plays the flute in the film.
“When I told the Queen I had met her as a little girl, she thought it was quite amusing. I never thought when I started millinery that I would be living in England and making hats for the Queen.”