Stricter dress codes have been introduced in the Royal Enclosure at Royal Ascot: no strapless, low-cut, transparent dresses, no mini-skirts, no fake tans and no bare legs. But what does it really mean to dress in a fashionable, glamorous and stylish way. Milliner and accessory designer Louis Mariette should know, after all he’s used to make women “dazzle, shimmer and shine”.
Stepping into Louis Mariette’s showroom feels a bit like entering a magic and enchanted place. The narrow and steep steps of his studio located just around the corner from Sloane Square open onto a reasonably-sized all-white room. Near the bottom of the stairs a stone tub with rose petals gently floating on the surface of the water contributes to give a sense of peacefulness. The most striking feature of the room, though, is not its brightness or tranquillity, but the quirky headpieces hanging from the walls. There are headdresses covered with precious stones, hats as big as buttons with long branches protruding from them or shells stacked in a tall crown-like headpiece of the sort that only the queen mermaid in the most fantastic fables would wear. “I usually don’t even drawn a design of the headpiece I have in mind as I often come up with an idea just by looking at a whole collection of feathers, trimmings and fabrics,” Mariette explains me while we sip a coffee. “I already know what my mind wants the piece to look like and how it will be worn. The challenging part is working out the technicality of putting the piece together as I sometimes have elements such as insects or flowers miraculously floating in the air.”
The main inspiration for some of the quirkiest pieces the flamboyant milliner shows me comes from his childhood. Born in Malawi, to a Mauritian father and an Indian mother, Mariette spent his childhood partly at a boarding school in England and partly in Africa following his English stepfather, a vet, as he visited the most obscure and remote villages of the continent. The indigenous flora and fauna soon cast a spell on the young Mariette, “The petals of exotic flowers such as the honeysuckle or cacti flowers inspired some of my designs,” he says, “but also birds like the lilac-breasted roller with its colour palette or the ibis with its multi-coloured underbelly feathers. I was also fascinated by the insect world and spent hours studying insects catching a prey, watching ants moving different items or praying mantises about to take flight.”
We move to another room that looks exactly like the opposite of the previous one, this one is in fact completely black, but also here there are traces of the designer’s African childhood. On one wall shelves upon shelves are stacked with his new range of bejewelled pieces – necklaces, brooches, and pin hats – but a central place is occupied by the “Spirit of Africa”, a very special headdress with a deer’s head mounted on a red mini top hat. “Crystals found inside stones and rocks that I used to collect from river beds during the dry season started a huge fascination in me for semi-precious stones,” he recounts, “while my headpieces with animal heads or skulls are inspired by the parts of animals that you can sometimes find in African deserts.”
It wasn’t only nature that inspired the designer: one of his headpieces is inspired by “e‘Lollipop”, the mid-70s South African cult film by Ashley Lazarus that tells the tale of two inseparable children. Despite the fear, hatred and brutality that plagued South Africa at the time, the film told a story of friendship, love and commitment that transcended racial boundaries. Mariette turned the story into an ethereal white headpiece adorned with leaves-like hand-painted resin circles. “The film influenced my life very much,” he states. “It taught me how important it is to understand people and respect different cultures. This is also why this hat became very meaningful to me.”
Mariette got to millinery in a peculiar way: a few years ago he was working as an event planner, and, to spark up a party, he designed little headpieces. Creative director Michael Dye saw them and was so impressed that he commissioned 25 pieces for a show by Italian clothing company Clips. “I didn’t want to do it as I was afraid I was going to ruin his reputation,” he reveals. “Then he told me the show was about the 1930s and the Orient Express and these are two of my favourite references, so I accepted.” Mariette spent months working on this commission, but his efforts were rewarded when his creations were finally approved. He never looked back since and his career as a milliner went from strength to strength: one of his most famous creations is the world’s most expensive hat, the £1.5 million diamond and platinum “Chapeau d’Amour”, made for the opening of the new hat department at Harrods. Despite there being a whole world of traditions linked to the art of millinery – such as France’s St. Catherine’s Day when unmarried women wear hats in the yellow and green colours – unfortunately, many of us consider this as a dying craft. Yet Mariette is confident in its future. “In England we are lucky because there is still that traditional element of wearing hats for example at a wedding, and of course there is the Royal Ascot, which is a bit like the Oscars of the hat world for milliners. But there are celebrities – such as Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Dita Von Teese – who are bringing them back in quite a trendy way. So stylists, photographers, creative directors and also ordinary people are seeing hats as flamboyant and exciting accessories.”
Creating a bespoke hat can be a lengthy process: first Mariette sits with a client to try and understand their personality, as, he argues, a hat is a sort of second skin that you must feel happy wearing. “It’s very important for me to understand what the hat is for, if it’s for a special event or an occasion,” he says. “Then I have to find out if my client has plans to have a dress made or if she already has a dress. When it comes to Ascot, most of the times, we have the hat designed first and then the dress, as in this case the hat is more important.”
There’s a little eccentric side to Mariette as well, what he calls “hat stalking”. “If I’m walking around the town and I see a lady who looks extraordinary in her hat, I haunt her down, introduce myself and invite her to the studio because I would love to make a hat made for anyone who looks so extraordinary.” It was during one of his stalking sessions that he saw a lady in black wearing a beautiful hat. He eventually approached her and introduced himself to her only to discover she was a Georgian princess who invited him to her house, “It was simply amazing,” he recounts. “All the ways up to the stairs there were hundreds of hatboxes, all of them containing a different hat. I had never seen so many hats before.”
But are princesses the only ones really allowed to wear a hat? Definitely not. According to Mariette a woman who can wear her hat well is for example Paloma Picasso, who is maybe not the classical beauty type, but has a really strong face that can carry off the look. “People think you’ve got to be beautiful to wear a hat, but it’s not true at all,” he claims. “Wearing a hat is not about necessarily being a stunning looking woman, but it’s literally about personality and confidence and making sure you wear a style that suits you.”
There will be soon new surprises by Louis Mariette: after his headpieces and bejewelled accessories, there is a fragrance in the pipes. The perfume is ready, but the designer is just hanging onto it for a while to make sure it gets the right presentation it deserves. “I don’t care how many years it’s going to take me,” he states, “I just don’t want to rush it as I want to get it right.”
As we step out in Mariette’s tiny garden adorned with white empty birdcages and often used as background for photo shoots, he reveals me that having travelled a lot as a child allowed him to meet people from different cultures and walks of life and to learn an important lesson: understanding and respecting people is the key to the world’s harmony. “There are people who come to visit me and complain about petty and superficial things,” he tells me. “I always remind them of people living in villages in some other parts of the world where they don’t have access to drinkable water or people who are in worst situations than ourselves. I’m very lucky to do the job I do, but there are people out there – doctors, nurses and firefighters – who are saving people’s lives and for me they are the real heroes of the world as they put themselves in the frontline to help others.”
Louis Mariette’s journey from event management to stylist, milliner and accessory designer has been so far long and glamorous. But what’s best about it is that it didn’t make him forget where he comes from.
Louis Mariette, Bespoke Hat Couture (by appointment), 36a Sloane Gardens, Sloane Square, London SW1W 8DJ, UK