The Austrian milliner discusses reviving a “dying craft” and making extraordinary chapeaus for people bolder than herself
- Who is it? Sassa Ann van Wyk is the Austrian milliner whose Paris label spans couture and ready-to-wear headwear.
- Why do I want it? Because these sculptural handmade hats, balancing the curated and the curious, the adornment and the artefact, will become lifelong companions.
- Where can I find it? Sassa Ann van Wyk’s headwear is available to order directly from the designer by email.
Who is it? Austrian milliner Sassa Ann van Wyk has never once worn one of her own hats. “I could never, I don’t have the confidence of my clients,” she says, with a laugh, of the feathered and felted pieces she crafts for other people’s heads. And yet, since she first tried her hand at hatmaking during her first year of technical high school in Vienna at 13, she has dedicated her working life to the puzzle of headwear. Her Paris label now produces couture and ready-to-wear pieces, one collection a year with each piece hand-sewn, in pursuit of a form that looks, as she puts it, “as though gravity no longer exists.”
Millinery, the centuries-old discipline of making hats by hand, is a fast-fading profession of which van Wyk is one of the last holdouts. “I love that it’s a dying craft,” she reflects, “it’s so hard to get knowledge about it. There are so few people who make everything by hand.” At 18 she interned with Philip Treacy, then stayed on full-time for three and a half years, learning “so many tricks, so much about all these different materials you could use.” After working in opera and theatre in Vienna, followed by a stint with a latex manufacturer that took her to Paris, van Wyk felt the pull to return to her own creations, reviving her practice and founding her namesake label.
If the craft is solitary – and van Wyk relishes the private metabolism of her own ideas – the hats it produces rarely remain private. “I love trying to understand other people’s worlds,” she says of the collaborations that run alongside her own collections. A recent one with Laura Andraschko produced a towering bearskin hat built entirely from marabou feathers, made for the lookbook and for which, much to her surprise, shops placed orders.
Why do I want it? Because, like van Wyk, you will never get bored of the possibilities of her creations. She approaches millinery with the glee and lateral logic of a mathematician: each design is a haptic equation to be solved between a single head and the unorthodox materials she uses. Valanced cushioned domes, made from second-hand blankets, balance miraculously aslant on the head; summer straw hats peel and warp, fastened with a vintage grosgrain ribbon choker; oversized spandex bows trill and frill into the air with a seeming weightlessness. At first glance, each design is familiar, and then curiously askew. “I love finding new ways to execute things,” she muses. “I never get bored of it. There’s always so much to learn.”
Material play is the basis of all the milliner’s creations – “I’m unfortunately a hoarder,” she says of felt, for which she keeps alerts running on every resale platform in Europe, buying vintage and second-hand in bulk. “Take a 50-year-old felt hat,” she explains. “You just take off the grosgrain ribbon, make it wet, reblock it. And it’s a fully new hat.” Feathers and straw are other favourites and recently she’s added spandex, the first synthetic fabric she has worked with. “It’s such a weird material,” she says. “I love how it’s so shiny, so stretchy. It kind of looks cheap, in a way.”
Van Wyk is in the process of opening a studio on boulevard Voltaire in Paris – where she will be able to receive clients for bespoke fittings – and in October she’ll host her first showroom presenting ready-made headwear. Her clients have so far found her by word of mouth, in keeping with the intimate contact underpinning her process: fitting a hat correctly means touching someone’s head, at length – or “to crown someone,” as she puts it. “I really hope that my clients hold on to their pieces for a long time,” she says. “If they break, they come back to me for repairs. Or if they don't like it any more, we can alter it, change its colour.” But for now, the milliner is enjoying watching her eccentric creations enter new chapters: “One of my clients wore one of the bows to the opera. I love seeing them out in the wild. I think ‘Wow … people wear this’ … I could never.”
Where can I find it? Sassa Ann van Wyk’s headwear is available to order directly from the designer by email.