What Happens When Fiction Walks Into a Milliner's Studio
Sometimes a character arrives before the hat does.
That is how it felt when I began working with Michelle Lovric on her novel The Puffin. The book already had its own wit, danger, and Venetian atmosphere. My task was not simply to make hats inspired by the story. It was to listen closely enough so that the hats could step out of the pages and behave as if they had always belonged there.
This project became a conversation between fiction and millinery. Michelle brought the words, the history, the characters, and the intrigue. I brought straw, ribbon, structure, color, and the practical question every milliner asks sooner or later: How would this actually be made?
Meeting Michelle
When Michelle and I first began talking about The Puffin, the most exciting thing was that she had imagined a world where hats mattered.
They were not decoration. They carried meaning. They hid things. They expressed desire, disguise, politics, and danger. They had to be beautiful, but they also had to be clever.
What would a hat made by Alva Visentin say before anyone spoke?
That question shaped everything.
I was not making reproductions in any sense. I was making objects that had to relate to the logic of the story. They needed to work as hats, but also as clues. They needed to feel plausible in the hand, not just in the imagination.
Enter Alva Visentin
She is described as a “Brimstone Milliner making combustible hats,” which is the sort of phrase that sets the mind alight. It gives you danger and craft in one breath. A milliner is already someone who builds with air, angle, shadow, and suggestion. Add brimstone, and suddenly the hat becomes a fuse.
One of Alva’s lines stayed with me throughout the project:
“My hats expounded on the structural differences between men and women, each of whom naturally craves what he or she is not and has not.”
It is a wonderfully provocative idea for a fictional milliner. It made me think about hats as architecture for the body. A brim can conceal or reveal. A crown can exaggerate height or add softness. Ribbon can restrain, decorate, bind, or mislead.
Alva’s hats could not be passive. They had to do something.
In working from Michelle’s words, I began to think of Alva not just as a character who made hats, but as a maker who understood that a hat sits at a powerful point on the body. It frames the face, changes the silhouette, and announces how a person wishes to be seen.
For Alva, that announcement might also contain a threat.
Cecilia Monti’s hats
The two hats I recreated for Cecilia Monti are especially important to the book's plot. They are beautiful objects, but their beauty is only part of their purpose. Both hats carry secrets.
The first is a bergère in Leghorn straw, with knots in the ribbon around the brim. At first glance, the knots read as trimming, a decoration around the hat. But each knot has another function—a musket ball could be concealed inside it.
The stretches of ribbon between the knots had their own use, as well. A map or letter could be rolled tightly and slotted into those spaces. The hat becomes a courier. It can travel in plain sight. It can sit above the wearer’s face while carrying information that could alter the course of a life.
That double purpose fascinated me. The challenge was to keep the hat graceful while honoring the mechanics of concealment. If the hiding places looked too obvious, the hat failed as a disguise. If they were too flimsy, they failed as part of the story’s physical world.
The second hat is a Milan straw. Its brim tips upward at the back, where many folds of a wide ribbon create secret compartments for revolutionary material. A fold can be decorative and useful at the same time. A curve can distract the eye. A generous ribbon can hold more than it seems.
I also built a secret code into this hat. The different colors of the ornaments refer to the Carbonari, the secret society that plotted liberation from the Habsburg Empire, which occupied Venice from the early 19th century until 1866.
That detail gave the hat another layer. It was not only hiding objects. It was speaking to those who knew how to read it.
The Puffin gets his hats
Alongside Cecilia’s secretive hats, I also had the rather delightful task of creating two hats for The Puffin himself.
This was a different sort of challenge. I wasn’t making hats for a historical character described in passing; I was making hats for a character who had, quite literally, come to life in Michelle’s imagination.
The first was a felt bicorn, inspired by the Napoleonic era. The bicorn has such an unmistakable silhouette—part military, part theatrical—and it seemed just right for The Puffin. It had a little history, a little swagger, and, I hoped, plenty of character.
For his second hat, we moved into the Regency period of the early 1800s and created a turban, a style that was particularly fashionable at the time.
Michelle had spoken quite a bit about the Barbury feather, which was an important fashion detail of the period. It also carries a rather grim story: A bird could die for the sake of a single feather.
That small detail stayed with me. It is easy to look at historical fashion and see only the romance of it—the beautiful fabrics, elaborate shapes, and extravagant ornament. But the materials themselves often have stories attached to them.
Making these two hats gave me the chance to think about The Puffin not simply as a bird, but as a character. How do you suggest a personality through shape, proportion, and detail without turning the hat into a costume?
For me, that is where the real fun of millinery lies.
A few carefully chosen details can say an awful lot.
And suddenly, a character that existed only in the pages of a novel was sitting in my studio, being fitted for his hat.
From words to hats
The pleasure of this work was in the movement between page and hand.
A novelist can give a hat a destiny. A milliner has to give it weight and balance. The ribbon must fold. The straw must behave. The trim must sit in exactly the right place. The secret compartment must not announce itself too loudly.
That is what made working with Michelle Lovric so rewarding. Her fiction made room for the intelligence of objects. The hats were not afterthoughts. They were part of the machinery of the novel, part of its humor and danger.
I often think that millinery lives between the practical and the impossible. A hat has to fit a head, but it also has to fit a dream. In this project, that dream happened to include a brimstone milliner, a Venetian plot, a puffin, hidden musket balls, coded colors, and ribbons that knew more than they admitted.
When fiction walks into a milliner’s studio, it brings more than a description. It brings motive.
And if you are lucky, it leaves wearing a hat.
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