Hats with heart

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It took Melbourne milliner Waltraud Reiner many years to find her calling as maker of
fine hats. Now she wants to share her passion with the world. Kieren Charteris reports.

Waltraud Reiner‘s studio is the type of place you could spend hours fossicking around in. Housed on the first floor of her A-frame home in the Melbourne suburb of Murrumbeena, it is filled with the gorgeous raw materials and fascinating paraphernalia of hat making. Arcane-looking tools lie on a wooden bench next to sewing machines, steamers and contraptions that would not look out of place in a medieval torture chamber. Bolts of bright-coloured fabric are piled on the floor like rainbows in solid form. The walls are lined with shelves of wooden hat blocks and stacks of hat boxes, prettily patterned as well as sensible brown leather. Drawers open to reveal a treasure-trove of gold, silver and copper buttons and buckles, sparkling costume jewellery, time-yellowed cotton reels and tape measures, and cards of delicate brocade and lace. Then of course there are the hats – piled, perched and pegged wherever there’s space; everything from simple sun hats, to bold avant garde creations and frivolous confections of ribbon and feathers.

What you don’t expect to see though, is a swing. Suspended on long ropes from the lofty central beam is a wooden swing of the type often pictured in children’s books. Waltraud answers the inevitable question with a throaty laugh. “My life is very busy, very organised,” the 48-year-old explains in the precise accent of her native Austria. “I'm always making hats, teaching workshops, travelling, as well as being wife to my darling husband Warrick and mother to my dear son Torby and daughter Orlanda. Sometimes I just need a break from all that. So I go for a swing. It makes me forget about everything for a while. I am a girl again.”

It was when Waltraud was a teenager in Austria that she took her first tentative steps on the path that was eventually to lead her to running her successful millinery business, Torb and Reiner, today. Enrolled in fashion school in the city of Graz, she bought her very first hat. “It was red, very simple – just a crown and a brim – but beautifully made. I loved wearing it but hats were not very fashionable in the dreaded 1970s so everybody laughed at me. I had to stop wearing it.”

She completed her four-year fashion degree at age 19, but something just didn’t feel right. “I enjoyed fabrics, I enjoyed design, but I was not allowed to be myself. I always had to follow the catwalks and what was fashionable. Being young, I thought, ’Okay, so maybe I won’t be a fashion designer; I’ll be a social worker instead. I would be really good at that.’”

But her parents couldn’t afford to fund further study, so Waltraud was forced to seek work. The next eight years were spent “trying on“ various jobs to find one that “fitted”. “I ended up as a ski instructor in Germany. I thought, ‘This isn’t Waltraud either. I will not want to drink schnapps and tell jokes, as you do as a ski instructor, when I’m 30.’”

An advertisement for Australia in the newspaper inspired her to seek new opportunities in warmer, more exotic climes. “I wanted to know what this inner force was that was driving me forward and I thought, ’Well, I’ve wandered from Austria to Germany and I‘ve travelled around; maybe I'll go a little further.‘”

Several months later she found herself working as a nanny in Melbourne – and that’s when her true calling made itself known. Walking around the quiet suburban streets, she passed a hat shop and decided to go in out of sheer ennui. “When I got inside I realised it was a made-to-measure boutique. Being a good Austrian girl, I didn’t want to waste the owner’s time and turned to leave. But before I could, the owner, a Hungarian lady in her late sixties, called out to me rather abruptly, ‘What do you want?’ It was obvious I did not want a hat made to measure, so in order not to look bad, I said I had come to ask if she needed an apprentice. And she said, ‘No, I don’t. But I need somebody to sew. Can you sew? Good. Be here at nine on Saturday. Don’t be late!’”

Always keen to learn new skills, Waltraud returned at the agreed time. She was ushered into a dim workroom with lots of hat brims and crowns on the table. That’s when things started to feel strangely right. “I always loved red and purple, even though I was told they must never be put together. So she picks up a red brim with a purple edge and shows me how to stitch in a head fitting. After about 20 to 30 minutes I had this incredible feeling of warmth in my stomach which radiated all over my body. I realised my intuition had led me to my purpose in life. I was home. I started work with her on Monday and have never put a needle down since.”

Waltraud spent a year learning from the shop owner, Magda Urban, before her thirst for more knowledge took her back to Europe, albeit this time accompanied by another newfound passion, her husband Warrick. “I took him back to meet my family and from there went in search of ’the hat‘ wherever my road took me. I ended up in London, where I found Rose Cory, who made hats for the Queen Mum for many years. I worked under her kind eyes for four years until I found the courage to go back to Melbourne to take over the shop where it all began.”

During her time in London, Waltraud also worked for Philip Somerville, who counts the Duchess of Kent, Margaret Thatcher, Joan Collins and the late Princess Diana among his customers. “I was the ‘juniorest’ junior in the workroom, but just being there and seeing what was going on was a lesson in itself.”

Waltraud’s journey with hats still held significant lessons in store. After reopening Magda‘s studio as By Appointment Only, she made a name for herself creating striking hats for events such as the Melbourne Cup and the Flemington races. She also began teaching millinery classes at TAFE. Waltraud and Warrick’s son Torby had been born in 1989, when they were overseas, so when the couple added a daughter, Orlanda, to their family in 1992, it seemed life couldn’t get much better.

But in 1997 a tragic forklift accident left Warrick a paraplegic. Waltraud was forced to sell By Appointment Only and concentrate on guiding her family through the difficult time ahead, although she still worked from home and taught at TAFE. “I became the provider, with no time to be creative,” she explains. “I was doing nothing for myself; just giving. I was crying over things which were not worth crying over. But I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want help from anybody. In my heart I knew I needed to do something but I did not know what.”

Fortunately she found an outlet while attending a textile fibre forum in Melbourne in 2000. “I realised that by making things I could express all the emotions I had built up in those three years. I made figures which were coming apart at the seams, they were red, they were laden with stones, they were screwed together with bits hanging off, plaster figures with the arm broken, beings hiding in cocoons. I was sitting in that class in a corner crying, laughing, telling a joke, and crying some more. I had found words without speaking. I had found my therapy. I was myself again.”

That turning point eventually led Waltraud to establish The Blue Hat Project (see Shades of blue, right) but it influenced her teaching almost immediately. “It became less about technique and more about teaching that hats need to fit you from the inside out. If you come to my class and want to make a sun hat, fine, I’ll help you. But I will also encourage you to make a hat which is going to make your soul dance – a hat you might only wear with the curtains closed when you are alone in the house but a hat which makes you feel good.”

Waltraud’s passion for hats is responsible for Hat Week (1-7 September) and Hat Extravaganza, opportunities to wear hats without feeling out of place and to experience the creations of hat makers from Australia and further afield. She also holds regular workshops at the Torb and Reiner studio, as well as interstate and overseas. They cover hat making from a variety of fibres, how to make an old hat look new, how to make a hat fit different-sized heads and how to wear (or not wear) a hat. “I’m always looking for new things to make hats from. I have followed ‘the rules’ in millinery and I have broken them. The more rules which I break, the more wonderful things I discover.”

Hats have been considered a fashion item since the late 11th century but declined in the 1960s. Waltraud blames this on the practical requirements of the then fashionable bouffant hairstyles and the theoretical stylings of women’s liberation. “Women were sick of having to wear hats, gloves and stockings. And because we learn things by watching our parents, the next generation lost that knowledge. They think they can’t wear hats, but all of it can be learned.”

“I wear hats every day when I go out. Without one I feel naked. I also have hats just for home; I have a hat for sitting on my swing in the studio, and another one to have breakfast in bed, in a glamorous robe. I have about 40 in total, but my absolute favourite is made from a mould taken of Torby’s first pair of shoes.

“You put a hat on and the simplest outfit looks amazing; even if it’s just a flower, a headband or a scarf, a hat brings the outfit up. But it has to be the right hat; a hat which doesn’t fit is like knickers which don’t fit. And it has to fit from the inside out, because, as Lilly Dache, a famous milliner in the 1930s, said: ‘A hat is the expression of a woman’s soul. It is something she wears on her head, but belongs to her heart.’”

Shades of blue

The Blue Hat Project aims to raise awareness and money for beyondblue, the national initiative for depression. “It’s a simple idea,” explains Waltraud. “We wear many hats in our lives – in my case, wife, mother, friend, milliner and teacher. One of these hats is the blues hat or hat of depression, but we do not talk about it. People keep that hat on so tight that sometimes they pop. And that is not a pretty sight.” The Blue Hat Project provides an opportunity to express the blues not with words but by ’doing‘. “Making a blue hat is not going to fix depression; it’s not going to bring the lost ones back. But it gives an expression of people’s sadness and pain. And it can allow you to talk about issues which are often seen as private or personal. So it releases the pressure.”

For more information on the project and other resources to combat depression, visit www.bluehatproject.org.au.

Making your own hat

Torb and Reiner offers hat-making workshops for all skill levels, from beginner to professional. For more information and to buy millinery supplies and DVDs on hat making and 'Hatiquette', or the dos and don’ts of wearing a hat, call (03) 9504 4476 or visit www.torbandreiner.com. You can see Waltraud in action at some of The Stitches & Craft Shows around Australia, starting in Melbourne, 14-18 March.

For details, call 1800 770 222 or visit www.stitchesandcraft.com.au.

Words: Kieren Charteris. Photography: Andrew Lehmann. Hair & make-up: Ruth Sebire.