CHANEL’s Métiers d’art Maison Michel, a milliner since 1936, exhibited a selection of hats at the Villa Noailles during the 34th edition of the Hyères International Festival of Fashion, Photography and Fashion Accessories.
Maison Michel’s hats and head accessories – fedoras, caps, boaters, veils, bonnets – pay homage to Maison Michel’s craftsmanship and introduced visitors to some of its most beautiful fashion creations. The installation unveiled what goes into creating hats, from initial sketches to the selection of materials and how they are brought to life in the Maison Michel ateliers.
Since 1936 Maison Michel has imagined hats that are anything but an accessory. A reflection of its period, a dialogue with trends, a design that evolves as rapidly as the head it will dress: this is the mission of a fashion-house with a savoir-faire unaltered, yet constantly re-envisioned.
As a part of CHANEL’s Métiers d’Arts houses, Maison Michel Paris collaborates with prestigious brands; since 2006, it also offers its own eponymous label characterised by the most cutting-edge creative approach.
Priscilla Royer, as its Creative Director since Winter 2015-2016, engages in a reflection reaching beyond the hat to the head that carries it, geared towards the individual and his or her style. The aura of Maison Michel is carried by strong personalities —feminine as well as masculine—, designs that combine innovative technologies, alternative cultural and historical references, wearability and attitude.
“At the Parisian ateliers, vocabularies are turned on their heads, and norms are shaken up. These desacralised objects—in form as well as in function— are versatile and adaptable, and reinjected into a multi-facetted daily life. This way, Maison Michel perpetuates what hats have always achieved: to be a frame as well as a celebration of all faces.” – 2019 Hyères Festival of Fashion, Photography and Fashion Accessories.
